In Subarnarekha, Ritwik Ghatak takes the stuff of melodrama and turns it into a piercing political cry. Ishwar and his younger sister Sita are two Bengali refugees reduced to living in dire poverty on the banks of the river Subarnarekha. The love between Sita and the orphan Abhiram arouses Ishwar's jealousy, so the two run off to Calcutta, where they have a child. Abhiram's death forces Sita into prostitution, but her first customer happens to be a lonely, desperate drunk: Ishwar. The encounter is as horrific as we might imagine, yet for Ghatak, these two souls, reduced to their purest misery, are only emblematic of the trail of human waste left by colonialism in a post-independence, growingly industrialized society. Still, as with all of Ghatak's films, this one ends on a note of optimism, however frail, as Ishwar, along with Sita's now-orphaned son, ambles off toward a life that, like the river, flows on.