Twenty years have passed since Asha arrived in Barcelona in 1974, coming from Bombay, yet it feels like yesterday.
She remembers everything vividly, through the eyes of a six-year-old girl, somewhat frightened, but above all very excited to have finally achieved what she had longed for so much: parents.
In her new life, she has received everything: a family, friends, an education. She feels chosen, privileged. She has always asked herself: why me?
In her father’s arms, she learned to touch an imaginary infinite sky with her fingertips, and in her mother’s, the laws of the heart: to love, to cry, to forgive, to let the best of oneself flow.
They did not give her life, but they gave her all of their essence, an inheritance beyond blood.
At twenty-six, she feels it is time to look back, to learn more, to delve into her roots, to relive the first years of her childhood—in short, to move forward by starting at the beginning.
She needs to return to India, the place where she was born, to try to answer countless questions, dispel uncertainty, and fill the gaps hidden in her own reality, so that she can find her inner peace.
But she doesn’t want to go back as just another tourist; that’s why, when she is accepted by an NGO needing volunteers for a project at a work camp in Bombay, she thinks: My dream come true!
She packs her bags, ready to reconnect with her past, her origins, heading to that country of many contrasts: extremely wealthy people and people in poverty, beautiful landscapes and rats running through the streets. A country with penetrating smells, sometimes delicious aromas, sometimes odors of unknown origin. A country with great intellectuals and the largest film industry in the world, yet still governed by ancestral customs, such as arranged marriages.
At first, it is hard for her to perceive her homeland as it really is, to let go of prejudices and obstacles (spicy food, suffocating heat, discomfort…). She had always hoped to understand Marathi (the language she spoke when she arrived in Barcelona) or Hindi, because she had heard that when you speak a language as a child, you never completely lose it. But that didn’t happen: she didn’t remember a single word; everything was new to her.
Once she manages to shift her perspective, she sees what she had not yet been able to see, studies her surroundings with fresh eyes, recognizes the harmony in everything; in short, she begins to understand these Eastern lives, which have a philosophy, a reality, beneath the surface.
In The Two Faces of the Moon, Asha returns to India to film a documentary about her life. But she carries another secret intention hidden in her suitcase: to find a member of her biological family.
