Jaya and Sharmin—a film produced by Jaya Ahsan—is a quiet reminder of who we were and still are, five years after the pandemic struck.  In this quiet, haunting two-woman film, the pandemic is never centerstage—rather the film avoids its dramatization. There are no sirens, no scenes of hospital chaos, no feverish handheld camera work. Instead, the film offers what most pandemic stories avoid: the internal climate of a shared household. Time slows. Fear settles. News flits across the TV, unnoticed. Through understated rhythm, the film accomplishes something powerful—it keeps the focus on the emotional, relational toll of confinement, rather than its spectacle.

This is a film about what happens when two women—one a public figure, the other a domestic worker—are confined together by circumstances within a socially stratified structure. That this is a female-led production matters. It is unmistakably shaped by women's emotional intelligence and the directorial effort is worthy of praise. This is not a "strong women" story in the Marvel Universe sense. Rather, the film shows women absorbing, enduring, witnessing, and navigating unequal relationships—not with men, but with each other.

The film unfolds within the walls of a single home in Dhaka. Jaya, a well-known actress, moves through her days in the slow drift familiar to many of us during lockdown. She types on an old typewriter once owned by her father. She listens to BBC radio and speaks wistfully of a time when people built their mornings around the news—often as a family, as opposed to the contemporary routine of solitary consumption of social media.

As these women navigate the Pandemic-induced confinement, their days repeat. So do their meals. Their silences through walks to the rooftop or looking out the verandah—spaces where the sky is the only reminder of an outside world—have been visualized by the Director with great affect.

Sharmin, the house help, cooks, cleans, answers the phone, and listens. She is, like so many domestic workers in South Asia, physically proximate but emotionally peripheral. The pandemic may have blurred class lines for some, but not here. In this house, caregiving is constant and unequally valued.

The film resists melodrama. There are no monologues. No climaxes. Just accumulation—of days, gestures, absences, and unmet glances. Emotional tension builds not through confrontation but through withholding. This is a film that asks us to look not at what is said, but to comprehend the silences and emotions.

At its heart, the film showcases the asymmetries of care and vulnerabilities. Sharmin is expected to serve, absorb, and remain silent—even when the emotional temperature of the house spikes. At moments, Jaya reaches out—but her concern, though sincere, is shaped by the same structures that keep Sharmin at the margins. Even when care is offered, the terms are not equal.

There is a brief reversal when Sharmin becomes unwell, and Jaya takes on the caregiving role. But the structural lines never blur. Even in vulnerability, Sharmin insists on keeping her employer safe. It is a scene that reflects a deeper truth: domestic workers are expected to carry both emotional and physical labor.

One of the most powerful choices in the film is Sharmin's eventual exit (spoiler alert!). There is no confrontation, no moral arc, no sentimental music. She simply leaves—quietly, deliberately, without being told she is safe from the disease or asked to stay. In a film where movement is constrained, her departure becomes the only unscripted act—an assertion of dignity in a space where she was never fully seen.

This is where Jaya and Sharmin becomes a mirror—of our classed households, of the emotional economies some women sustain without acknowledgement, of the silences that define both domestic work and middle-class fragility. In Bangladesh today, as debates are raging around women's rights, this film quietly but sharply re-centers a truth we often sidestep, that many "empowerment" narratives ignore social stratification. We speak of public leadership and representation, but rarely of domestic labor protections. We critique patriarchy, but seldom the hierarchies we replicate at home. Feminism, if it is to mean anything, must make room for the women who clean our floors and carry our fevers.

The film does not preach. It opens up space for reflection—on the inequalities inside our households, on the distance between care and recognition, and on the emotional toll of being near someone without ever being fully allowed to matter. The pandemic may have locked everyone in, but it did not flatten the hierarchy inside the house. At a moment when so much public discourse is being reduced to slogans, this film dares to say less—and in that restraint, it says everything.

Dr. Cynthia Farid is an Advocate of the Supreme Court and an Independent Researcher.