5 min readNew DelhiJul 5, 2026 05:26 PM IST
First published on: Jul 5, 2026 at 04:02 PM IST
Dear Express reader,
The heat and dust of summer notwithstanding, it has been a season of contemplating the strange, contradictory nature of affection, at once sustaining and all-consuming. Two stories, entirely unconnected, pose the same question from opposite ends: What does it mean to love someone, and what are we prepared to do, or endure, in its name?
At the heart of Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga is a love sundered by Partition, by violence so unimaginable that it leaves Ishar Singh Grewal, or Keenu, its Sikh protagonist, unmoored in a land both his own and not quite. Home for him remains always just beyond reach, in Sargodha in Pakistan’s Punjab, from where none of the women of his family could make their way across to India that bloody night, where he left behind his beloved Jiya, a young Muslim girl, with a promise to return.
It is a love forged in tenderness and tested by history’s worst instincts. Partition renders Ishar into a different person, his fondness for nazms, his gentleness always at a slight remove from the family he eventually builds. He becomes its patriarch and provider, but not, it appears, its emotional anchor. It is only on his deathbed, through his memories of Jiya, loved and lost and borne in his heart since like a talisman, that he softens into the man he might have been.
These two faces of love — at its most extraordinary, soaring to outlast one of the cruellest of ruptures, steadfast in its refusal to surrender to hate; and, in the everyday ordinary, never fully present, sometimes acerbic — bookend Ishar’s long life. His grandson Nirvair, unable to commit to a relationship, is moved by the capacity of the human heart to hold on to a memory, faithfully, silently, across an entire lifetime and an uncrossable border, asking nothing in return except to be remembered. Ishar’s eldest son Iqbal, Nirvair’s father, remembers the loneliness, instead, of tiptoeing around a parent they could never quite reach. Love makes and unmakes Ishar, over and over again, in each relationship.
In one poignant scene in the film, Nirvair tells his on-again, off-again girlfriend, love is a lot like poison. Unless expended, even a single drop left within becomes a torment. That love is not redemption alone, that it can be ugly and sordid has become apparent in recent days through a grim parable playing out in Pune where Ketan Agarwal, a 26-year-old businessman was pushed to his death from Lohagad Fort allegedly by Siya Goyal, the 20-year-old woman he was engaged to marry, and Chetan Chaudhary, the man she was purportedly involved with. In the course of custodial interrogations, Goyal has apparently said that the murder seemed easier to orchestrate than convincing her family of her disinclination to marry Ketan.
It is easy to dismiss such a case as an aberration, to blame it on moral depravity, to ask why Goyal didn’t simply break off the wedding. These are all valid reactions. But while it is no explanation for murder, it also shows how so many young people in this country are never given the emotional vocabulary, or the psychological safety, to say no.
Dating apps and Instagram declarations may suggest a more liberated India, but beneath the gloss, large swathes of families are still guided by old covenants of control, obedience and honour. In this vision of parenting, autonomy is negotiated sparingly; love comes with an emotional debt, sharpened by considerations of caste, community and religion. A child raised within that compact learns early that disagreement is betrayal, that performing consent is easier than confronting family prejudice. They become adept at saying yes when they mean no, at hiding relationships, ambitions and disappointments until concealment becomes second nature.
Often, that acquiescence hardens into a lifetime of resignation. In the rarest, most terrible of cases, it mutates into something far darker.
The distance between Ishar’s lifelong devotion and the horror that unfolded at Lohagad may appear impossible to bridge, yet both stories illuminate the same unsettling truth — love is shaped as much by the freedoms it is denied as by the emotions it inspires. What Ishar’s story represents is affection at its most enduring, what the incident in Lohagarh indicates is what happens when trust collapses.
None of this excuses the crime. But it does raise a harder question that we all must ask ourselves: Perhaps the measure of a society is not how fervently it celebrates love, but whether it can let love chart its many-splendoured course without putting intolerable constraints on it.
Stay well,
Paromita
paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com
What Ishar's story represents is affection at its most enduring, what the incident in Lohagarh indicates is what happens when trust collapses. (File images enhanced by AI) 
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