Unbroken Glass

Unbroken Glass is a warm, sad, endearing and sometimes funny documentary centered on an Indian immigrant family.  Dinesh Sabu, the youngest of five children, attempts to piece together the lives of his parents that tragically died a month apart when he was just six years old.  Their deaths left the five children to raise each other and cope with the loss.  Densely packed with several themes, Sabu’s work explores the lives of his parents and the themes of loss, marriage, mental illness, acculturation, religion, and even gender roles.  With few memories of his own to rely on, Sabu must turn to interviews with his siblings and other relatives to find out who his parents really were.

We learn through the narratives that the father died of stomach cancer and the children were not prepared ahead of time for his death.  Sabu is merely informed one day when he gets home from school that his father is gone.  His mother then dies less than a month later by her own hand after battling schizophrenia through most of her adult life. Undoubtedly, the stigma of mental illness and suicide are major factors in the silence that was maintained by the family. 

The film deals with her illness, and the childrens’ experience of it; how she was available to them sometimes, and sometimes not, as she would lapse into a cold and catatonic state.  Their recollection of their parents’ marriage was as of a stormy one—their fights sometimes devolved into shouting and physical altercations.  Still, despite false accusations of infidelity from his wife, their father stayed and soldiered on.  He coped by burying himself in his work, perhaps resigning himself as her caretaker.  One of the children commented that without someone to care for them, many schizophrenics end up on the street—which may well have been the fate of their mother without their father.

It’s clear that the mother attempted to fit in to the U.S. despite her traditional Hindi upbringing– the family uncovers old photographs show her in modern American dress that would be deemed scandalous by the standards of homeland.  Sabu nicely contrasts his mother’s acculturation with his own attempt to reconnect to his family’s native culture as he prepares for a wedding in India.   Yet, despite her own admittance to medical school, the mother foregoes a professional life and marries a man that is well educated and has a future—adopting traditional Indian gender roles.

We learn that schizophrenia runs in the family and that there have been multiple suicides in his family tree that resulted from it.  This fact provokes the painful decision of whether to take on that risk by having children.  One of the sisters weighs her thoughts during the interviewing and decided that she will, in fact, take the plunge.  We are left to wonder whether any of these five or their children will succumb to the family curse.  We wonder also whether the mother’s genetic predisposition was triggered by the stress of moving to America.

This film conjures up another excellent book of the same genre:  The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn.  In his book, Mendelsohn, a descendant of Holocaust victims, took up the challenge of learning about his great aunt, great uncle, and their four daughters to discover exactly who those six people were.   Like Sabu, Mendelsohn’s family was encased in silence about them until he discovered some letters that piqued his curiosity and he spun out a wonderful mystery book from the fragmentary bits available to him.   It seems that we often have an almost innate drive to tell the story of our blood, especially when it is tinged by tragedy or misunderstanding.  It gives meaning to the lives that are gone and helps us to come to a better understanding of ourselves.

I told a friend that the film provoked the question of what my children will say about my wife and I after we are gone.  My friend said, “Why don’t you ask them now?”  It wouldn’t do any good. That story is still in progress and while memories may be a bit clearer, you do not gain perspective until much time passes and you are able to go through all the photographs, read the letters, and visit the places they inhabited.  Because of the parent/child bond, they are unlikely to give you a candid view.   Often, our complete stories will not be able to be told until long after we are gone.

Sabu does all that in a warm, yet painful way that will provoke questions and thoughts that linger for days after.   Despite the tragedy and years of silence, one can detect an underlying tensile strength in the family.  We are on another level awed by the resiliency and resourcefulness of this family that survived a terrible tragedy. This is a surprisingly complex short film that can be viewed through several different lenses.