A 95-year-old Sikh patriarch (Naseeruddin Shah) quivers on his deathbed. He mutters what sounds like gibberish: random words and incoherent ramblings, delusions dancing with reality. The only thing clear is his desperate desire to visit the pre-Partition Punjab he grew up in. His adult sons put it down to his dementia; they wait for the inevitable. But the old man refuses to go, almost as if he were tricking his life into flashing before his eyes. These flashes, though, feature nothing from his 78 long years in India; they feature everything from his first 17 in ‘Pakistan’. His grandson (Diljit Dosanjh), a London-based NRI who rushes to him, is the only one he responds to. He’s the only one willing to look for a breathing tale within the debris of fractured memory. A portrait of love in the time of severance emerges: his college days as Keenu (a soulful Vedang Raina), a girl named Afsana (Sharvari), furtive glances, covert meet-cutes, his mediocre Urdu poetry, dreams interrupted, a romance rushed by history, and a love story suddenly reduced to faith and fate.
Main Vaapas Aaunga is the second Hindi film this year to see Sargodha through the misty-eyed lens of nostalgia and closure. Perhaps if the grandson listened harder, he might have heard childhood names like Arun Khetarpal (the late Dharmendra) and Asghar (the late Asrani), the former residents who reunite and reminisce as grand old men in Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis. The two movies share a mindset. It takes an illness of memory — a rift in longing — to summon the simplicity of belonging. Just as the actual Partition is erased from an Alzheimer’s-afflicted Asghar’s brain, a dying ‘Keenu’ no longer fathoms the concept of two nations separated by an ink-drawn line. An early scene shows him trying to take a car all the way to Sargodha until he is detained at the border. All he understands is the abrupt crisis that made him promise Afsana: “Main vaapas aaunga (I will come back)”. All he gets is the wooing that mutated into a last-ditch vow. All he knows is the romance left incomplete; the split in the land that caused it may as well have been an earthquake.
Sometimes figuring out a film is the most rewarding way to watch it. It’s like being drawn to a person who is striving to say something essential: something that you know will be worth the struggle. Main Vaapas Aaunga is almost hypnotic in that sense. It channels the personality of its central character — the fading man passionately mumbling about Martians and Hitler, who seems to be making no sense. But his grandson insists on deciphering, translating, engaging, adapting; he probes until he discovers that every orphaned word has meaning, every term is a souvenir searching for significance, every strange reference stems from a subconscious dripping with fact, every shadow is a ghost of the light he once saw. The film resists the temptation of going comic in the man’s quest: one that mirrors that of the grandfather (Dharmendra again) from Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani. The stakes are high here: the younger man knows that if love dies with those who lost it, hate is all that’s inherited. He knows that if history is not humanised, it gets moulded into toxic echoes of a shared past. The contemporary allusions to the India we live in are subtle, not least due to the clever casting of an actor from Dhurandhar.
These layers are not immediately obvious. They are revealed, bit by bit, like shards of communication peeking through the clouds. The storyteller recalls his young and insulated self: the way he doesn’t take the threat of a Partition seriously, the way he chooses denial and apolitical logic (“you think Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims can be separated?”) over reality, the way he uses the musicality of ignorance to protect his romance from the unrest around them. It’s like he partitions his love from the truth of time. At some point, the narrative scale of the Partition — the treatment of women from both sides, communal riots, corpse-filled trains, ruptured families, survival guilt, generational trauma — consumes the cinema of his longing. Keenu is forced to grow up overnight and recognise the wider tragedy. His feelings are shoved aside. It’s as if the intimacy of his own anguish is forced to merge and disappear in a collective grief of displacement. The singularity of the love story is consumed by the plurality of archival suffering and stopgap patriotism. He internalises the Faiz verse: “Aur bhi dukh hai zamaane mein mohabbat ke siva (there are other sorrows in the world beyond the pain of love)”.
In terms of dramatic effect, Keenu’s life brings to mind the shock of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Sardar Udham (2021): where a young man is so overwhelmed by the brutality around him that the death of his mute girlfriend becomes a footnote. He is so affected by the destruction of humanity around him that he forsakes the act of being human by turning into a vengeful revolutionary. The protagonist of Main Vaapas Aaunga cannot pay the same price; he is cursed with the linearity of survival. It’s not that he is obsessed with the girl for 78 years, he is conditioned into omitting that chapter — and killing the boy he was — in order to stay alive. It’s why the detail of him being a cold and distant father is so effective. By redacting those first years of his life, he redacted his ability to love.
And it’s also why the staging of this character is so lyrical. The disease of forgetting gives him the agency to remember. He is finally free to stumble through a dusty memory lane, after decades of traversing concrete highways. Not that it needed confirmation, but Naseeruddin Shah’s performance cements his status as India’s greatest living actor. He is transcendent as the old Sikh man, reframing the neurological war between lucidity and dementia as a chronological battle between masculinity and emotion. The command of his craft shapes an absolute tearjerker of a climax, allowing the restless film to come full circle. There are times when he evokes a poet’s private grief — like an aged Leonard Cohen reading out a last letter to muse Marianne — with a face that wears the public scars of a partition.
Editor Aarti Bajaj is virtually a co-director on Imtiaz Ali movies for how she traces the flow of blood through them and gives it a natural body. The trust in the viewer and their language of thinking is evident from the way she fuses timelines and feelings, motion and instinct, sounds and stillness. In her hands, you smile at how Shah’s character imagines himself in the past: a handsome and idealistic teenager resisting the cracks of strife around him. Even the fleeting shots that don’t fit in manage to supply the stream-of-consciousness spirit of the story; there’s no ‘wrong’ way to fashion a hallucinatory narrative, but Bajaj finds a compassionate way without ever alienating the audience. She elevates the good portions of the film so much that you feel like forgetting the mistakes — like the Nargis Fakhri-coded casting of Banita Sandhu, the grandson’s standup-comedy bug, or the glib parallels between his track as an immigrant by choice to the grandfather’s journey as an outsider by force.
When a movie is all rhythm and rhapsody, its flaws stand out like stray notes that reflect the indulgences of its makers. But the movie passes (away) like a human would; you want to remember the highs and ignore the lows. It’s the kind of film that makes you grieve for losses you’ve not even experienced. A.R. Rahman’s soundtrack, too, is such that it seems to make music out of disparate pieces and displaced cultures. Most of the songs flow through regions and genres like secular entities that get segregated and silenced by the ambience of history.
Which brings me to the fluid identity of the director. Imtiaz Ali has spent much of his career being lauded and accused of the same thing: telling the same tale in different ways. With Main Vaapas Aaunga, however, he confronts the derivations of his own legacy. There are shades of his entire filmography scattered like ash across this movie: an eloping sequence from Jab We Met, the dual structure of Love Aaj Kal, the furtive glances of the newer Love Aaj Kal, the performativeness of love and wandering from Rockstar and Tamasha, the magic-light montages of Amar Singh Chamkila, even the Punjab-roots trauma from Jab Harry Met Sejal.
In many ways, the old storyteller on the bed is a version of Ali himself. He initially sounds like he’s deriving a greatest-hits album out of bygone truths and fictions. But once it emerges that the old man is struggling to reclaim the innocence of his past after bearing the brunt of a future, the parallels feel poignant. The film then becomes a self-critique of sorts. Just as the boy chose to numb his heart in service of a nation-shaped upheaval, Main Vaapas Aaunga feels like a confession that Ali cannot afford to create self-absorbed and designer-broken heroes who behave like they’re isolated from the planet’s problems. The dying protagonist’s condition exposes the toll of living so dearly that it would be futile to make those same movies again. The idea of romance as a bubble no longer applies; even bubbles are inextricable from the unpredictable atmosphere they float through. The character has seen too much to breathe on his own terms, which is why it takes a malfunctioning mind to revisit the sheltered kid he used to be.
As a result, the trajectory is baked into the film. The NRI grandson represents the modern drifter who fears cubicles and manufactures his own conflicts (you could make a case for how this being the weakest track is almost deliberate). The teen-aged avatar in 1947 is a vintage iteration of him. But it’s the delirious old man who represents the evolution of an Imtiaz Ali hero into Chamkila-level territory: a suitor vapourised by the pressures of his environment. In most of his movies, couples travel through places and times to reckon with their feelings. It’s the world that contains a love story. But in Main Vaapas Aaunga, the love story has to contend with the world. It’s a world in which a plea for humanity becomes an extension of a bashful proposal.