In a way, all of them are well on their way to shunning actual men in favour of their own fertile imaginations. Usha has discovered the giddy promise of erotic fiction (“Lipstick wale sapne”) late in life, after perhaps never being touched and indulged on equal footing.
And how, despite their tiny phases of happiness and hope and morality, they will eventually turn into the next person. How they’re maybe reflecting and visualizing a future and past they cannot escape. When we see all four of them together, it’s hard not to think of how they’re perhaps chatting with different versions of themselves. The specifics of their situations keep changing, but her fate between age 18 and 55 remains the same. They belong to one story, and yet they are a bit of every story.
In spite of simultaneous narratives based in the same space, these four are virtually the same woman – and yet, they are many women. And finally, Usha (an outstanding Ratna Pathak Shah), the withered widow and everyone’s universal “Bua ji,” is an organic and reawakened old-age extension of poor Shireen. One can imagine Leela then being suppressed after her “wild past” and sedated into the childbearing future of Shireen ( Konkona Sen Sharma in top gear), a submissive housewife with secret ambitions of a sales career. In fact, Rehana (Plabita Borthakur), the rebellious shoplifting teenager, might have logically grown into Leela (an on-fire Aahana Kumra), the oversexed and two-timing hustler. Early on in Lipstick Under My Burkha, it becomes clear that all four of Alankrita Shrivastava’s female protagonists essentially symbolize different life stages of a singularly smothered existence.