‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’: What Happens When We Forget Partition?
A dementia-stricken man tries to return home, forcing his family and the audience to confront a long-lost past.
A man older than independent India wakes up one morning and forgets that Partition ever happened. He hops into his car and orders his driver to take him to Lahore. “Lahore!” the driver says. “It’s on the other side of the border.” But there is no border, the old man remarks. Once he reaches the border, he reflects: “I am from the other side. Maybe I came to this side by mistake.” After all, back when he was a student of words, poetry, and song, this was all only one land: Punjab. Modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — and their man-made borders — were yet to come.
This is the tender restlessness that pulsates through Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga, separating man from context, and land from land, as they each ache to reunite. This very restlessness is usually a mainstay in the director’s storytelling, featuring men in transit, running away from something. Aditya of Jab We Met (2007), Ved of Tamasha (2015), Harry of Jab Harry Met Sejal (2017) — all these men on the run need a woman who can stop and moor them. You can say Imtiaz Ali has been desperately remaking the same film, hoping to one day perfect this chronicle of rescuing. In Main Vaapas Aaunga, he finally forces the man to return, using a dementia-riddled brain. This isn’t a movie about escaping; it’s a tale of confrontation. And that’s precisely why it’s urgent viewing.