As urban English-speaking Kolkatans who are encouraged to think and even dream in English at the cost of our mother tongue, it’s easy to relate to Radhika. After all, having married a Bengali poet, Radhika (Bipasha Basu) is confronted with her own culture with such visceral force that she turns almost hostile to it. It’s not as if she is uncomfortable with Bengali, but the language of her husband’s soul is not that of her own. Indranil (Prosenjit), on the other hand is a man who is lost in his private world of words and arcane musings. His devotion to Radhika is like that of a particularly moody child’s whim. At times he is all attention and soulful eyes, but he also capable of abandoning her in a taxi in the middle of the night. Alas, you exclaim, he is a person who has cultivated his craft at the expense of his heart.

The film begins at Indranil’s condolence meeting where his close friends and associates remember their moments with him. Through a serious of interflowing flashbacks, we are introduced to Indranil, the person. Actually, along with us Radhika too learns more about her dead husband as she goes back to a few defining moments in her relationship. Their domestic help, Priyabala (a brilliant Sohag Sen), helps Radhika in the endeavour, by giving her an outsider’s perspective. The luxury of hindsight helps her understand her husband’s compulsions and question her actions, or so it seems. For Ghosh chooses not to spell things out and Bipasha who has that seemingly indigenous British ability to register irony through sideways glance, twitching of lips and inflections, also betrays precious little. In the end we do more than witness Indranil’s death; we encounter an elusive, original personality who, like so many people in life, disappears too soon.