From Jab We Met to Main Vaapas Aaunga, Imtiaz Ali finally finds the home he fled

For refugees who’ve struggled hard to make ends meet and give their descendants a life they never had, it’d be rather puzzling to wrap their head around a young daughter of their family who wants to flee home because it holds her spirit captive. That’s because Geet isn’t a byproduct of the Partition trauma, but the millennial liberated by a free market, which has also seeped into her choice of love and life despite a sheltered upbringing.

For her, home isn’t the one which she’s inherited from her forefathers, but one that she wants to build on her own, nestled away from civilization. Finding a new place and building a new home aren’t compulsions, but dreams woven out of free will. Eloping is probably a desperate need of rebellion to break away from the conformist life she’s lived under the shadows of her family, who’ve seen too much displacement and too many hardships for them to let Geet chase the rainbow.

Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor in Jab We Met.

Compare her stern grandfather (Dara Singh) to Naseeruddin Shah in Main Vaapas Aaunga. Both have built a life for their family from scratch in a land far removed from the one they associate as home. We never see Shah’s character turn dominating towards his family, but we hear from his son (Rajat Kapoor) that he held on to a life full of hate and control, which only alienated him from his father.

Imtiaz never shines a light on that side of Shah’s character out of choice — he doesn’t want us to remember him from the years when he was fuelled by hatred. Because now, he’s closest to the man he was in his teenage years — a free-spirited, zealous fellow, much like Geet. Not clued into the divisive politics of his time, a young Keenu (Vedang Raina) objected to Punjab being torn into two on communal lines. His window was limited to his state, and not his country, as the only purpose of his life was to have a daily-meet cute ritual with his love interest, Afsana (Sharvari). Even his memory of displacement has more beauty than bloodshed. Blooming, blood-red flowers take the foreground in cinematographer Sylvester Fonseca’s frame as refugees rushing out is relegated to the background.

Vedang Raina and Sharvari in a still from Main Vaapas Aaunga.

*Spoilers ahead*

So, when he’s made to flee his hometown of Sargodha, he promises to return. Despite his grandfather getting killed while escaping, Keenu’s resolve stems from the fact that he has unfinished business in his native place. But years later, when he does return, he finds out the women of his family, including his sister, were brutally raped and murdered by the Pakistani separatists. The gratitude for another Pakistani (Manish Chaudhari) providing shelter to his family is soon replaced by hate for a community — which even Afsana belongs to.

A parallel can be drawn to the arc of Geet, who realizes that the home she longed for exists only in her fantasy — just like for Keenu, home as he knew it exits only in memory now. Like him, she also goes to the other extreme, stripping her otherwise zestful life of even a hint of a sparkle. Having given up on both love and home, she does live an isolated life, but by compulsion, not by choice. It’s like she’s made to flee from what she considers home, not because of sociopolitical pressure, but because of the rebellion of her newly freed spirit, long colonized by Partition-infused patriarchy.

On a side note, watching Dolly Ahluwalia, Keenu’s grandmother, slash the throats of little girls of her family in order to save them from getting raped is so heartbreaking, particularly because it comes from the same actor, who in another universe and in another film, was a source of so much joy despite a shared history. Dolly Arora in Shoojit Sircar’s Vicky Donor (2012) was also a woman with roots in Pakistan, who built her new life from scratch in New Delhi’s refugee colony, downing pent-up sorrows with her mother-in-law over Patiala pegs.

Both Keenu and Geet also get domesticized and disillusioned on similar lines. It takes them a saviour to enable their homecoming, of very different kinds. For Geet, the homecoming on paper seems to be her reuniting with Ashutosh and being accepted by her family back in Patiala. But the constant feeling of missing a train never leaves her. Are those flashes of the trauma of her forefathers fleeing their native place on a packed train? No. Missing a train is simply a metaphor for a missed opportunity. That missed opportunity is Aditya (Shahid Kapoor), who she’s fallen in love with. But he’s just a symbol of her homecoming. Her coming home to an evolved version of herself, one who’s free but not a rebel without a cause, one who’s romantic but not foolish, and one who doesn’t need to flee home to make her presence felt.

Similarly, after living a whole life, of over 75 years, Keenu realizes his missed opportunity — of not looking back. His words to his younger brother — “peechhe mud ke nahi dekhna” (never look back) — must have echoed in his ears all his life. He also keeps the cause of his hate to himself, refusing to pass on the trauma to his descendants. But it takes his grandson Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) to enable his homecoming. As a GenZ, he may not know what he wants exactly in life, shuttling from one job and relationship to another, but he realizes the value of closure. That’s what he believes his grandfather craves for on his death bed.

Naseeruddin Shah and Diljit Dosanjh in Main Vaapas Aaunga.

Unlike in Yash Chopra’s 2004 seminal cross-border romance Veer-Zaara, the closure isn’t reunion with a past lover. That lover, yet again, is a symbol of what one was before giving in to the lines of hatred drawn by political powers. For him, closure is a homecoming to his old self, one who loved without abandon and across man-made divisions. He doesn’t want to claim his old love. All he wants is to tell her — and through her, himself — that a part of the Keenu who loved is still buried under the Keenu who’s grown to hate. It’s oddly similar to the closure Geet gets when she dishes out abuses at Anshuman on phone — it’s not to promote toxic unrequited love, but to finally reunite with her older, unhinged self.

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It’s in moments like these that Imtiaz Ali finally comes home. Many of his characters — Jordan (Ranbir Kapoor) in Rockstar, Veera (Alia Bhatt) in Highway, and Harry (Shah Rukh Khan) in Jab Harry Met Sejal — have a bittersweet relationship in home, which they find elsewhere. But Main Vaapas Aaunga is an oath of homecoming. Till six months ago, the title was a Border 2 song sung by Diljit Dosanjh, the soldier, as an assurance to his family and nation that he’d come back victorious in war. But now, it’s both a promise and plea to look beyond borders and wars to an India that preferred love to hate. Imtiaz realizes — and then shows — how love isn’t just a fantasy nestled in the hills. It’s our default call to action, even if the universe conspires to tell us otherwise.