In an age characterised by an aesthetic of “immediacy” and a rejection of abstraction, where art is bereft of depth and subtleties, ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ takes the audience to a world that lingers over memory, silence and emotional residue.
Ishar Singh, portrayed so poignantly by Naseeruddin Shah, is a 95-year-old man who has spent his entire life in the lingering pain of separation from his beloved Jiya/Afsana (played by Sharvari) in the background of Partition, marked by a profound loss of home and family. On his deathbed, he is resisting death to keep the promise he made to Jiya to return.
The longing for something that is left behind and the desperation to catch its glimpse in your final moments renders one’s heart heavy. In a way, it is a story of millions of Punjabis who migrated across the border, hoping to return someday to that thing, place or person.
At its core, it is a film about love that survives in absence. The film portrays love as a lingering ache carried across decades. The pain of the characters does not stem from betrayal or hatred, but circumstances beyond their control. Ishar Singh carries the ache of separation from Jiya in his heart all his life, which may have rendered him a cold and distant patriarch of the family. But in his final days, he only remembers his love during the turbulence of Partition; he mutters confusingly his pain of losing his family, his home, his love.
His memories have faded due to dementia and all that he carries with him now is seemingly muddled thoughts of days leading up to the partition of India.
Elders’ rants are often dismissed as gibberish, making no clear sense, but memory works in erratic ways where the facts and events are often fictionalised to produce a seemingly confused story. Ishar Singh, suffering from dementia, is transported to his youth where he yearns to fulfill the demand made by his beloved Afsana, who refused to accept his nazm unless he himself recited it to her.
He doesn’t remember Partition and borders. He attempts to visit Sargodha, which for him is nearby, and ends up getting a stroke while at the border that lands him in hospital. Memory in the film, as in everyday life, is distorted and fragile. Reality is not shaped by what happened, but by the desire, becoming more elusive with time. For him, those who participated in communal violence during Partition were not the common people or even humans. They were aliens from Mars who set the fields on fire. Hitler too was a Martian!
The film’s pace allows these layers to unravel through the mediation of Nirvair (played by Diljit Dosanjh), Ishar’s grandson. He lives in the United Kingdom and is himself disconnected, running away from commitments. Ishar’s memories, his recollections and devotion exert a profound influence on Nirvair’s own sense of life and love. In a way, instead of Nirvair helping Ishar find closure, Ishar helps Nirvair find a deeper understanding of love as something that extends beyond possession or compulsion.
Ishar also offers Nirvair a mirror to reflect on his sense of identity at large. Through what is said and also left unsaid, the narrative suggests that Keenu, the young Ishar, keeps the love alive, transforming sorrow into a form of devotion that transcends time and distance.
Imtiaz Ali, the director of the film and its co-writer, mentions it in one of his interviews, “What you are pining for is the only thing that you carry with you as it is the only thing that you remember every day.” Trapped in his dying body, Ishar longs to meet Jiya one last time, to recite the poem he wrote for her, to seek her permission to finally go.
The love story of Keenu and Jiya is not just a romance between two individuals. It is in fact a lens which allows larger social tensions to unpack through it. Their story begs the question: who gets to decide how human beings live, who they should love, who they should befriend?
The film’s dialogue with Partition goes beyond violence and leans more on love and sharedness. Although Imtiaz Ali doesn’t shy away from depicting the horrendous scenes of communal attacks and violence against women and children, the approach to the narratives of Partition explored through Ishar’s memory is refreshing. Ishar remembers his budding love, his friend Aftab, his college, playing cricket and his town Sargodha, everything that he left behind.
His identification of the rioters as an alien species is in fact an indication of the gravity of the excesses that people bore; such was the magnitude of violence that ordinary people could not have participated in it! What may appear as a distortion of memory or its rejection is not as simple. This is of course not a denial of history, of what transpired during Partition. Rather, it is a way out that possibly allows Ishar to preserve a memory of a shared social world.
The other character through whom Partition is approached is Ishar’s younger brother Pali. He is reluctant to share anything with Nirvair related to the turbulence in Ishar’s mind. He sees the younger generation (or in fact any other than theirs) as unable to understand the complex and unfathomable experience that even they themselves find hard to comprehend. He fears that others would only respond to it with hatred towards the other community and therefore they choose to keep all the pain within themselves.
This poison that was given to them shall go with them to the grave. It is so profound that he does not lay the blame of the tragedy on any community despite bearing so much loss. It is also human to understand what both sides underwent.
In the end credits of the movie, the song ‘Kya Kamaal Hai’ envisions a world free from hatred, pain and loss juxtaposed by the stark reality of the modern world, that is depicted through the visuals of the devastation and displacement that people experience all across the world.
In times when violence, revenge and misogyny are glorified, ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ emphasises empathy. It truly embodies what art and cinema ought to do.
— The writer teaches English at Punjabi University
