Plot
A third-generation Ugandan Indian family residing in Kampala, is expelled from the country in 1972 by the Idi Amin regime. The father, Jay (Roshan Seth) moves with wife, Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore) and daughter, Mina (Sarita Choudhury) to Greenwood, Mississippi to live with family members who own a chain of motels there. Kinnu obtains work in a liquor store.
In 1990, 24-year-old Mina, who cleans at Anil's (Ranjit Chowdhry) family's motel (the Monte Cristo), falls in love with Demetrius (Denzel Washington), a local African American self-employed carpet cleaner. The respective families erupt in turmoil after the pair are discovered and confronted by members of the Indian family during a clandestine weekend of pleasure in Biloxi.
Ultimately, the two families cannot come to terms with the interracial pair, who flee the state together in Demetrius' van. After a brief return to Kampala to attend a court proceeding on the disposition of his confiscated Ugandan house, Jay relinquishes his long-nurtured dream of returning to Uganda, the place he considered home.
Read more about this topic: Mississippi Masala
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“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)