The Golden Jubilee

A family and its significant others gather one summer weekend in a northern California home.  They have come together to celebrate the 50th marriage anniversary of the masters of the house: a Bengali-American couple  Deb, in his 70s, and his wife Ruma, in her late 60s.  

 

Assembled in Deb and Ruma’s American-upper class, hillside home overlooking the Pacific.  Visiting America for the first time is Deb’s sister Nanda, a fiercely independent widow with a quizzical outlook on life, a writer for a women’s magazine in Kolkata; from Oxford, elder daughter Anji, an academic with her documentary filmmaker lover Asha, a Gujarati woman; from the Bay area, younger daughter Diya, a writer for a film magazine accompanied by her American televangelist-preacher lover Douglas and one-time rock singer; from elsewhere in California, son Ranju, a taciturn confirmed bachelor; Alan, Anji’s son from a failed marriage; Tom, Diya’s ex-husband still on affable terms with the rest of the family; and Diya’s and Tom’s twin teenage offspring.

A full house. Yet all is far from well:  Anji and Diya, once the closest of sisters, are now not even on speaking terms…

 

The Golden Jubilee weekend was to be a time of celebration through conversation and music.  But it also becomes a time of for relationships lost and found, of remembrances of willfully-forgotten things past, of confessions, of self-discoveries, of acceptances and rejections, of new decisions and of resolutions of old personal conundrums. In a succession of first person accounts told by the main protagonists, Deb, Ruma, Anji, Diya and, through the always quizzical gaze of the visitor from India, Nanda, unfolds a story of love and betrayal, of facts and fictions, of hypocrisy and honesty, of a life lived and one that never was.

 

Agent: Anuj

Edit: Sharvani