Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga revolves around a dying Partition survivor whose dementia gives him the agency to remember. And he remembers everything in the language of nothing. He remembers the past that he had to erase in service of a future. He remembers the fault-lines before the borders. He remembers his boundless student years in Sargodha: where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs lived together before they were made to feel like Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. He remembers the girl he fell for before their faith mutated into interfaith; he remembers her as a romantic who behaves like a literary figure from a book whose ink is fading. He remembers the adventures of ‘Keenu’ and ‘Jiya’ back when their actual names, Ishar and Afsana, were secondary sounds of identity. He remembers the hopeful isolations of their fantasy before it was infiltrated by the whims of reality. And he remembers a part of himself that loved for the sake of loving.
A 75-year-old Naseeruddin Shah plays this 95-year-old Sikh man hallucinating on his deathbed. He spends his last days wading through scattered memories and broken phrases from a story that only his NRI grandson, Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh), tries to understand. Shah’s character can be seen as a poignant allegory for many things. Like the film itself, which reframes the toil of deciphering as the art of listening; Keenu’s innocent truth is displaced by ruthless history, and Nirvair is the modern viewer who thinks he’s hearing a harmless love story. Or like the film’s director, Imtiaz Ali, a storyteller whose evolution is rooted in a desire to say goodbye to previous versions of himself. Or like a country, which still struggles to transmit the humanity of history through the politicisation of its consequences.
But there’s something more to his performance. It’s more than just the physicality of playing a man whose vacant gaze conveys the softness of longing and the violence of belonging. Or the way his eyes depict how the delusions of dementia contain more lucidity than the trappings of everyday expression. It’s more than the stillness of a body being consumed by the motion of memory. It’s more than his brow fixating on a thought as if it were an entity in the room. At some level, the credibility of this character is rooted in the authenticity of the performer. It’s as primal as watching an aging legend address his transience through a farewell-coded role. The craft is beyond doubt, but the rendition feels personal.
Keenu is seen as a successful businessman but a difficult person. He is incomprehensible at first; his strange gestures are dismissed as relics from a bygone generation. Only his grandson is willing to locate sense in the debris of his disjointed trauma. He is eventually revealed to be someone whose fate was co-opted by a rift that refused to dignify his individualism. You can almost see the grief of his family and sons growing, by the bedside, as they learn of his story and his sacrifices. They’re starting to miss him and regret his absence in real time. They’re beginning to detect the originality of his pain in a room full of inherited wounds and second-hand damage. After a point, it’s hard not to process this as a reflection of our companionship with Naseeruddin Shah’s career.
Shah has long been perceived as a grumpy genius: too skilful for mainstream Hindi cinema, too distant for star-sized heroism. I’ve always seen him as an artist who’s had to ‘settle’ for the constraints of parallel fame. It’s a small crime that someone with his filmography and stage-fuelled stature isn’t venerated enough. As tempting as it is to label him as an Anthony Hopkins or Robert De Niro born in the wrong country, it’s perhaps better to view them as a Naseeruddin Shah operating in the right one. His triumph is that he is no tragedy. His sustained run across mediums is testament to the fact that art is, at its most vital, an expansion of culture rather than a globalisation of it. The lens has silently shifted over time. The world-class performer who never got his dues has morphed into a national icon who has widened the realms of possibility and perspective in a country that’s increasingly averse to its own narrative. It’s the most vintage form of patriotism: to raise the bar of one’s own house instead of angling for parity in the neighbourhood.
It’s why his two most recent roles — a mere week apart — cut so deep. In the series Made In India: A Titan Story, his turn as industrialist J.R.D Tata taps into the essence of this nation-building. As the wise mentor to the founder of Titan watches, he comes full circle from his other popular mentor persona from two decades ago. If he coached a deaf-and-mute underdog to play for India in Iqbal (2005), it felt like he was coaching an India to emerge from its own underdog shadow in A Titan Story. But the reason his Keenu in Main Vaapas Aaunga hits like a ton of bricks is because it laments the loss of that India. It asks us to reckon with the passing of a spirit in an era of ghosts. Watching the frail character ask for permission to leave is to suddenly realise the mortality of that time. It’s to recognise the baton-passing lyricism of a Naseer using a Diljit as a conduit to show that he loved, lost, survived, defied, yearned and lived.
It’s to remember a maverick who — through countless moments of flawed fathers, punctured patriarchs, godmen and poets — excavated Indian identities rather than conforming to them. It’s to miss him while he’s still around. It’s to protect someone who symbolises the core memory of a place that’s conditioned to forget. And it’s to embrace the anticipatory grief of losing a voice that — unlike many contemporaries — resisted ideological surrender in a world that flattens volumes. Most actors, by definition, are measured by their ability to be other people. But great actors, like Naseeruddin Shah, are defined by the courage to remain themselves.