Reading the last scene of Piku: Why Shoojit Sircar’s film refuses to define its relationships

That such a question – as to the possibility of romance between the lead couple of a mainstream Hindi film – should be only vaguely answered, even by the film’s dénouement, speaks to Sircar and screenwriter Juhi Chaturvedi’s delicate storytelling. They are unwilling to put names to relationships. Every interaction in Piku, whether parental, familial, sexual or professional, slips out of its traditional parameters. Bhashkor confides private details about the family to his doctor, Shrivastav (Raghuvir Yadav). Piku’s aunt, Chhobi Mashi (Moushumi Chatterjee), asks Piku openly about her sex life and comments freely on Bhashkor’s chronic constipation. Indeed, constipation is the film’s life force, a running theme that infiltrates all conversations. Bhashkor himself brings it up, unafraid of grossing his interlocutors out.

Deepika Padukone-shared photos from Piku sets. (Photo: Deepika Padukone/Instagram)

He also takes a keen interest in Piku’s dating life. Very possessive of her, he wants her to be free of conventional matrimony – free to care for him, of course, but free nonetheless. Once, as Piku is speaking to a new potential man, Bhashkor interrupts: ‘She is financially independent, sexually independent. She just wants an emotional partnership.’ Piku is mortified, but Bhashkor is proud of his progressive ideals and he doesn’t care about propriety.

Perhaps as a result of this upbringing, Piku’s relationships with the two men in her life are both rendered ambiguous. The first is her business partner, Syed (Jisshu Sengupta), with whom she shares a calmly friends-with-benefits arrangement. Everyone appears aware of this – Chhobi Mashi asks after Syed and Dr Shrivastav offers counsel. Yet nobody, particularly Bhashkor, makes any demands on this relationship. Chhobi wants Piku to get married, but doesn’t seem to think it should definitely be Syed.

Piku and Syed never speak about their bond, yet both appear comfortable around each other. He is clearly not the man Piku wants to spend her life with – or she would, we think, have committed to him already: he’s right under her nose. Yet after a bad date, or in a family crisis, or especially on a lonely night, there’s nobody else she’d rather call. One night, Piku and her father get tipsy together and then retire to their separate rooms. We see Piku’s phone ring: it’s Syed. She has a knowing look on her face. The film cuts to the next morning, when the overdrinking has caused Bhashkor to lose consciousness. A bleary-eyed Syed walks down the corridor. Sircar’s handling of this moment is so muted (thanks also to editor Chandrashekhar Prajapati) that it took me a few watches to realise Syed had spent the night with Piku. Left unanswered are questions like, is he her boyfriend? Is this their first hook-up?

Piku stars Deepika Padukone and Irrfan Khan.

The other man who comes into Piku’s life – initially a source of irritation for her – is Rana, the owner of the taxi service Piku grudgingly uses. Rana drives Piku and Bhashkor to Kolkata. It’s tough to say, in Chaturvedi’s carefully wrought screenplay, when Piku and Rana begin to warm up to each other. Neither is initially impressed: Rana complains to Syed, who is a mutual friend, that he can’t take this ‘jhik-jhik baap-beti’/squabbling father-daughter pair. Piku admonishes him for his attempts to shoehorn himself into their squabbling. Sometimes, he says awkward things – such as when he exhorts Piku to drive by declaring, ‘Driving liberates a woman.’

Then comes a moment when he stands up for her. Bhashkor, in another of his curmudgeonly rants, comes down like a tonne of bricks on Piku. Rana stops the car and yells at Bhashkor. Padukone is masterful in this scene, her face registering everything: Piku is instantly embarrassed at this stranger shouting at her father, yet she is suddenly moved that someone is taking her part. No matter how much she does for Bhashkor, it never appears enough – but Rana shows them that it is.

Perhaps it is this quality of Rana’s that endears him to Piku: he tells the truth. He tells it baldly and plainly, especially when everybody else skirts around it. When Bhashkor demands Piku’s full-time care, other family members affably agree with him. Rana has no such pretensions. He tells Piku, ‘I hope you realise he is a selfish man.’ Piku immediately contradicts him (she has to), but it is the truth. Bhashkor, for all his blistering feminism, is a self-absorbed man with a big need to be babied and looked after.

A photo from Deepika Padukone and Irrfan Khan’s Piku sets.

Yet do Rana and Piku fall in love? Who knows? This is not a concern for Sircar or Chaturvedi – and, brilliantly, it doesn’t end up a concern for us either. By the end of the film, Piku has lost her father – her anchor, but also a millstone around her neck. At an earlier point in the film, having to attend to her father meant she missed out on a game of badminton with Rana. Today, in this last scene, she’s at leisure to do as she pleases. The maid’s arrival may or may not signal Piku and Rana’s marriage, but all that really matters is that Piku has found an equal, a partner, someone who gets her, someone she can hit a shuttlecock with. What more could any of us want?