Vaapsi on the wings of love

MAIN Vaapas Aaunga (I shall return) sounds like the catchy title of a typical Bollywood love story, which, in a sense, this film is. However, it is not the kind of Hindi movie in which the hero and heroine fall in love, are separated, and eventually meet at the end, overcoming all hurdles.

This is also not a predictable Partition love story where two young lovers are separated by the ‘border’ between two nations and, as the movie progresses, their uncorrupted love either triumphs or ends tragically. With veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah (Ishar Singh Grewal) in the lead role, supported by Diljit Dosanjh (Nirvair/Nivi), Sharvari (Jiya), Vedang Raina (Keenu, young Ishar) and others, Imtiaz Ali weaves a story layered with multiple messages.

The plot

The movie begins with a grumpy nonagenarian (Ishar Singh) developing signs of dementia. He has forgotten that India and Pakistan are two different countries, and that Sargodha, the town where he grew up, is on the other side of the border. Seized by a desire to visit the town and meet the girl he loved, he instructs his driver to take him to an address that is now across the international border in Pakistan. The driver resists, but he insists.

As expected, the border security personnel stop him and try to reason with him, but this adds to his agitation, and he suffers a stroke. For the rest of the movie, he is bedridden, with rapidly progressing dementia and an increasing urge to meet his beloved and redeem a pledge. His two sons wait for him to die, with varying degrees of resignation and impatience. However, his grandson (Nivi) returns from Britain when he learns of his grandfather’s condition and manages to communicate with him through the fog of his confusion. Piecing together the puzzle that had seemed increasingly impossible and fantastical, Nivi gradually begins to understand his grandfather’s desperation to return. As a British passport holder, Nivi is able to cross the border and connect his grandfather with his past via a video call.

Much of the story of young Keenu’s love for Jiya and the violence of the Partition play out in the background, even as Ishar Singh’s sons begin to develop a new understanding of and love for him. The movie ends with Nivi standing with his backpack against a backdrop of bombings across different parts of the world, rendering millions homeless. In the tragic helplessness of the victims, the movie invokes a parallel with the Partition of 1947.

Not just a movie

As with most good stories, the film has multiple layers. While themes of love, loss, violence and separation are universal and the film resonates with a wide range of audiences, each viewer’s response is likely to be subjective.

I come from a Partition family, and that was indeed actively on my mind when I went to watch the film. Though the specifics of the story had little in common with what I had heard from my elders, nearly everything seemed familiar. Over the past 10 years, I saw two elders of my family die in their late nineties after suffering from dementia in their late years. Neither of them expressed any great desire to return to the land of their birth, the home left behind. Nor did they mention any specific person they wished to meet. The members of their biradaris had all come with them, or had been killed. Or this is what we were told.

However, there indeed were commonalities. Among the things that resonated with me was a scene where Keenu tells his brother, Pali, to get up and leave, and not to look back, pichhe mud ke nahin dekhna. This happens during the only occasion when he returns to Sargodha in 1956 and discovers that the girl he loved has already been married to his classmate. Her husband takes them home and goes to call his wife, but they leave before she arrives. Decades later, from his hospital bed, Ishar Singh keeps pleading to be taken to Sargodha; his brother repeats, “Veerji, pichhe mud ke nahin dekhna,” but with little effect.

Pichhan, not to return

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I heard the word pichhan, meaning the place left behind, almost every day, in one context or another. Rarely did my elders refer to it as Pakistan or the other country. Everything about pichhan was great and authentic, from the fields and food to friendships and fashion. Even the weather seemed better there. However, nostalgia did not mean that they wanted to go back. By the time I was growing up, they had come to identify with the Indian nation, and perhaps also with Nehru’s idea of progress. Pichhan was the past, the land and memories left behind, never forgotten, and not to be carried forward.

We were also told every other day, almost like a ritual, how our family was saved by a Muslim neighbour, an influential widow who hid all of them in her house and kept them there until she felt that it would be impossible for her to keep them safe anymore. Even when she asked them to leave, she did her best to ensure that everyone in my immediate family crossed the border safely.

The Partition had been an extremely difficult experience. Like most others, my family spent months in camps. It took them several years to rebuild their lives in a completely new setting. Though everyone in my immediate family on my father’s side survived, my maternal grandfather and many other relatives were killed during the Partition violence.

However, they never spoke of their lives as stories of misery and hopelessness. They had crossed the border with virtually nothing; they had worked hard to rebuild their lives, reasonably successfully. They were helped by the Nehruvian State, which gave them titles to lands and houses left behind by Muslims. They also took to Nehruvian progressivism, the promise of a new life in an independent nation.

The ending

The movie ends with Ishar Singh’s grandson travelling to Sargodha and providing him with the closure he desperately sought. However, that’s not all that the movie shows us. It tells us about the energy and agency of love amid persistent violence, hatred and bombings, and the sadness of Nirvair. For Imtiaz Ali, this was perhaps the best way to end the story.

However, such an ending also offers us new avenues for engaging with our pichhan, not merely for those who are deeply nostalgic about the village or town of their birth, left behind in another nation, which is hard to travel to because of the prevailing geopolitical conditions, but also for humanity at large confronting meaningless violence and a perpetual sense of homelessness.

This is particularly true for South Asia, where the Partition continues to serve as the default moment of self-imagination and national identity formation. The only way to counter violence and hatred is through love, the enduring affection between Keenu and Jiya, his Mallika-e-Dilfareb.

Modern technology could help make such a Vaapsi possible, a journey that takes us forward. Though the grandson could easily cross the border and travel to Sargodha because of his British passport, we ought to also invoke and explore our traditions of love and forgiveness, richly available in the teachings of our Gurus, pirs and fakirs, Buddha and Guru Nanak, Farid and Kabir, Bulleh Shah and Mirabai, and many more.

At a time when the mid-20th-century ideas of progress and development have begun to appear illusory, and hope seems like an impossible mirage, such a Vaapsi becomes all the more urgent — if we wish to move further, for ourselves and for the generations to come.