At a time when the politics of hostility has engulfed the world and escalated it into senseless wars Main Vaapas Aaunga‘s unwavering belief in love is a testament to cinema’s uplifting gifts, notes Sukanya Verma.
Key Points
- Naseeruddin Shah’s performance is so terrifyingly authentic I wanted to seek out his number as soon as the show ended to check if he’s doing okay. There are no more words left to hail one of our greatest living actors.
- Every line, every wrinkle on this man is an epic. His grasp of old fashioned love is as keen as his old man yearning. In Naseer’s thoughtful skin, Ishar’s incoherence acquires a wisdom scarcely found in the world we now live in.
Survivors of Partition could never truly move on as the horrors it brought on continued to haunt their hearts for the rest of their days. So did the hope to see their home once in their lifetime.
They never really believed they won’t be able to return ever again.
I’ve heard of the displacement and a desire to revisit their home in stories of my grandparent-in-laws. They, like many others, on both sides of the border, died without getting their wish fulfilled.
Scenes of burying their wealth in the backyard with hopes of reclaiming it on return, fleeing bloodthirsty foes on the other side with the help of friends from the same community or women wearing a vial of poison around their necks in the event of violent mob attacks, days and days of uncertainty spent in camps would become stories of staying alive.
One that flocks of homeless and heartbroken refugees, like my relatives, would remember and remind generations to come.
Story of Repressed Memory and Love
Main Vaapas Aaunga is about one such refugee’s repressed memory whose fragments are pieced together in Imtiaz Ali’s emotionally resonant drama. It’s a love story not because of the transcendental ideas of romance it upholds but the legacy of hate it refuses to pass on among younger people.
Reams could be written on the subject of Partition but a rueful ‘why’ encapsulates the futility of it all.
At a time when the politics of hostility has engulfed the world and escalated it into senseless wars — most evocatively captured in the end credits song Kya Kamaal Hai filled with devastating images of uprooted victims from conflict torn lands — Main Vaapas Aaunga‘s unwavering belief in love is a testament to cinema’s uplifting gifts.
Showing new, evolved facets of his romantic and humanist filmmaking, Imtiaz Ali’s recurring theme of existential unrest finds an allegorical connection between a man’s love and his land. There’s a familiarity of his previous works but none of their weight in Main Vaapas Aaunga.
A Fabulous Naseer
95-year-old Ishar Singh Grewal (Naseeruddin Shah) is no longer in possession of his faculties when he insists on visiting Sargodha, a village in Punjab. Head claims it’s home. History corrects it’s Pakistan.
It’s not just some nostalgic yearning of a dying old man battling dementia but a deeply buried wound of a heavy heart, which only his grandson Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) cares enough to fix as he figures ways to reunite a man and his memories.
Released some years ago, Sardar Ka Grandson is a sorry example of a similar premise done wrong. Trying to make sense of Ishar’s incoherent speech strewn in hints and hogwash gives Nirvair a sense of purpose he’s solely lacking in his own life.
Between a boring software professional and unfunny standup comic bidding time in the UK while flitting between jobs and resisting the tag of relationship (to Banita Sandhu), Nirvair is at a crossroads of life where he needs to feel something and stop running in circles. And his Dadaji’s flashbacks about an apparition-like memory he chases emboldens Nirvair to come into his own unlike his resentful father Iqbal (Rajat Kapoor).
Though aware of his father’s disturbing past, the cold persona it’s given rise to in the aftermath is something Iqbal cannot reconcile with.
Ishar’s pathos is understandable too.
Though he went on to build a prosperous grihasti in Chandigarh, ghar still means Sargodha where he danced, dreamed and fell in love for the first and last time.
Dementia has set him free and feel the fervour of a bygone era once again as if it was only yesterday. There’s a lovely line I read in film critic Roger Ebert’sa review: ‘Our pasts may be flawed, but they are ours and we are attached to them.’
Ishar is profoundly attached to his.
Portraying Innocence Amidst Tragedy
Characters in period films based on true events tend to act and sound like they already know what’s going to happen. Main Vaapas Aaunga is a rare gem where they retain their innocence, not quite comprehending the seriousness of the situation as if reacting in real-time as opposed to from a place of knowledge.
So with every passing glimpse of his former self as Keenu (Vedang Raina), the shy young man — most likely nicknamed after Sargodha’s bounty of said orange variety — besotted by Jiah (Sharvari), the girl in chandbalis, a sad realisation grows of how once a picture of giddy young love came to be known as ‘someone who doesn’t have a heart’.
Like Amitabh Bachchan’s unrequited lover in Kabhie Kabhie living in a bungalow called Ateet, he’s a true inheritor of that soul-crushing Sagar Sarhadi line, ‘Daag daman pe nahi dil pe liye hai maine‘.
Generational trauma as a byproduct of Partition is a shrewdly suggested concern in Main Vaapas Aaunga as is its need to discontinue. When Nirvair goads his granduncle and Ishar’s younger brother (an excellent Vinod Nagpal) to reveal the source of his distress, he admits the blind rage that fuelled the communal riots back then is impossible to explain but important to never be repeated.
It’s as if all love is lost and hate is our only takeaway from history.
Though there are visuals of brutalities meted out by one side, the retaliation of another is tellingly implied in the looming curse and guilty conscious eating them up from within.
Imtiaz Ali steers clear of gory depictions of violence but the sequence of Dolly Ahluwalia engaged in hara-kiri deserves a place right beside the nightmarish scene of a Uttara Baokar-led crowd of women jumping to their deaths in a well in Govind Nihalani’s Tamas. The latter even has a line by Tamas author Bhisham Sahni — playing a senior Sikh guy in its television adaptation — cautioning his wife Dina Pathak, ‘Agar marne maarne ki naubat aa gayi toh main pehle tumhe goli maar dunga aur phir apne ko‘.
Dina Pathak’s son-in-law, and it cannot be said enough, is Main Vaapas Aaunga‘s heart, soul and lifeline.
Stellar Performances and Poetic Closure
Naseeruddin Shah’s performance is so terrifyingly authentic I wanted to seek out his number as soon as the show ended to check if he’s doing okay. There are no more words left to hail one of our greatest living actors.
Every line, every wrinkle on this man is an epic. His grasp of old fashioned love is as keen as his old man yearning. In Naseer’s thoughtful skin, Ishar’s incoherence acquires a wisdom scarcely found in the world we now live in.
As his younger version, Vedang Raina employs his easy likeability and unhurried charisma to portray a man almost otherworldly in his sensitivity and smitten state. His coy romance around a radiant Sharvari lends a lightness to Main Vaapas Aaunga if not the intensity of first love’s wild impulses.
On the other hand, Sharvari exudes old world charm and spunk in ways that brings black and white era heroines like Amita and Nimmi to mind.
In the contemporary era, Diljit Dosanjh’s role is, probably, the trickiest. As a complete bystander in a personal story he’s trying to decode and deliver justice to, his natural calm and wry sense of humour serves him superbly. The composure he brings to Nirvair perfectly complements the anxiety Naseer displays.
Main Vaapas Aaunga‘s window into the past is purely through Ishar’s fuzzy mind, which is free to carry a bias, exaggerate its beauty and leave a lot of things unexplained or unsaid.
Somehow, this inconsistency bodes well with his unfinished business even when frames of Keenu and Jiah flanked by flowers capture the camera’s fancy. Sylvester Fonseca’s luminous cinematography is quick on its feet but also pauses to reflect and ruminate.
Like the recurring visual of a vintage poster of a movie named Vaada alluding to the titular promise Keenu makes to himself.
Or when humanity seems just one change of head gear away as both a means of destruction and distinction.
Or the frozen image of Jiah standing still on a staircase between two floors and a ‘neither here nor there’ air about it.
She’s just as displaced as Keenu, oblivious to the world where they’ve pretended to move on.
Fonseca’s camerawork is only outdone by Aarti Bajaj’s fabulous editing. Imtiaz Ali and Nayanika Mahtani’s storytelling would have half its authority in Aarti’s absence. Ali’s soulmates in song, Lyricist Irshad Kamil and Composer A R Rahman, paint the soundscape in moods and melancholy that make the heart sing and sob in equal measure.
But it’s the playful Lara Lappa Lara Lappa Lai Rakhda vibe in Kiss Miss Yaara that’s an instant earworm. Main Vaapas Aaunga — I’ll be back — was a sentiment echoed by millions forced to leave their homes and waiting to return only to watch few days become forever.
What never left hold was a sense of belonging. And a craving for closure.
A Gulzar like quality envelopes Main Vaapas Aaunga‘s tearful climax evoking Ijaazat‘s elegiac verse: ‘Ek ijaazat de do bas jab isko dafnaoge main bhi wahin so jaaongi.’ As it happens, the Gulzaresque closure in Naseer’s farewells is as poignant as it is poetic where he goes from granting ijaazat to seeking it.
