Shadows of Time 2004

The film opens with the elderly Ravi driving to an abandoned carpet factory in West Bengal, where the quiet ruins reveal the echoes of a life spent in labor and memory. As he moves through the dust and relics, he brushes past his bed and other souvenirs, a tactile reminder of years that shaped him and the people around him.

The narrative then travels back to the early 1940s in pre-independence India, where a young Ravi Gupta toils as a child laborer in the same factory. He saves every penny he can, driven by a simple but stubborn dream: to leave the factory behind one day. In his world, a girl his age enters the frame: Masha, a girl sold to the factory by her father. They form a fragile friendship that becomes the center of his longing. When the obstinate factory manager Barun Chakraborty attempts to sell Masha to a wealthy man, Ravi desperately tries to outbid the potential buyer. He ultimately helps her escape with the money he has saved, and as they part, Masha promises to wait for him at every full moon at Calcutta’s great Kali temple.

Jumping forward in time, the story follows Ravi as an adult who leaves the factory and makes his way toward Calcutta. He finds work with an older carpet seller and his granddaughter, Deepa Tillotama Shome, beginning a chapter that will test the boundaries of ambition and conjure the ache of unfinished promises. In Calcutta, Masha has grown into a professional courtesan, drawn to a customs officer, Yani Mishra, who becomes her counterpart and, in many ways, a mirror of Ravi’s wandering fate. Masha visits the Shiva temple every full moon, hoping for a chance encounter with Ravi, who himself is actively searching for her. Their paths nearly intersect one night, but the surprise arrival of Deepa — whom Masha mistakes for Ravi’s wife — disturbs the moment and reshapes the trajectory of their lives.

As fate wends its way, Masha resolves to marry Yani, while Ravi, believing that Masha has forgotten him, marries Deepa. Ravi renovates his employer’s carpet shop and rises to become a notable exporter, a man whose success is tempered by a lingering grief for what might have been. Years pass, and a chance reunion at a dinner party—where Yani had once bought a carpet to impress Masha—sparks a renewed, complicated attraction between Ravi and Masha. What begins as renewed curiosity soon strains into an illicit affair, complicated by the realities of Yani’s transfer to Kerala. Masha fears losing Ravi again and urges him to act; Ravi arrives at the station with resolution, but he falters and leaves her behind. Before boarding, Yani tells Ravi that Masha is pregnant.

Another stretch of years unfolds: Yani visits Ravi to report that Masha delivered a son in Kerala, but the child is not Yani’s. He expels them from his house, and Ravi goes deep into the world of brothels to find Masha and their child. Masha refuses to see him, and he departs, sliding a packet of money into her room as a quiet if insufficient gesture of reconciliation.

The film then circles back to the present, with elderly Ravi back at the factory. He overhears a little girl and her grandmother in the courtyard and starts a conversation that reveals the grandmother is Masha herself, still waiting at the place where their paths first crossed. The revelation is breathtaking in its quiet, intimate pull. Ravi feels a profound astonishment, but he makes a deliberate choice to walk away. When the little girl asks who the man was, the grandmother answers simply and with a lingering tenderness: it was Ravi.

This is a story told through memory and longing, where past and present collide in the ruins of a factory and in the street-lit corridors of Calcutta. It is a meditation on the costs of circumstance, the stubbornness of hope, and the delicate thread that binds two people across decades of separation. The film’s rhythm—alternating between the dusty intimacy of the factory in its early days and the bustling, complex life of Calcutta—renders a tapestry of affection, longing, and the unresolved weight of choices made in youth. Throughout, the performances anchor a narrative that remains faithful to its core: the patient, elusive persistence of love against the push and pull of time, memory, and circumstance.