I don’t quite know whether I have the right to review Main Vaapas Aaunga. Perhaps I don’t. Partition is not an event one can casually review from the comfortable distance of a cinema seat. It belongs to memories, wounds, homes abandoned, families separated and lives that were never quite the same again.
But I do know what the film made me think about.
And strangely enough, it began for me with dementia.
The 95-year-old Ishar Singh Grewal/Keenu/Dadaji played by Naseeruddin Shah was so convincing that I believed his role till the very end. Dadaji’s dementia is not introduced to us merely as a medical condition. It becomes a doorway into the film’s larger meditation on memory. His mind appears to move between unrest-time and peacetime, between what happened and what his memory has preserved, rearranged or perhaps even gently invented. The present tells him one thing; his memories tell him another. And sometimes the memories seem to win.
The first time we see this fracture is when Dadaji wants to go to Sargodha. To him, Sargodha is still there. It is still a place he can go to. There is no emotional recognition that a Partition has taken place and that the world he remembers has been divided by a line on a map.
And there is something deeply painful about that.
History knows that Partition happened. Dadaji doesn’t.
Or perhaps I should say that Dadaji’s memory has refused to accept the emotional consequences of it.
That is what dementia does in this film that I found particularly haunting. Human memory is not a filing cabinet in which everything is neatly labelled, dated and put away. It is much more mischievous than that. It picks up a smell, a face, a song, a place, a name and suddenly transports us somewhere else. It mixes truth with imagination. It brings yesterday into today and sometimes makes fifty years ago feel more immediate than breakfast this morning.
And perhaps when memory begins to fail, it doesn’t necessarily preserve what is historically important. It preserves what is emotionally important.
Love.
Family.
Friendship.
Home.
The feeling of belonging.
Perhaps that is why Dadaji’s memories become so poignant. His mind may not be able to hold on to the political map of the world, but it seems to hold on to the human map of his life.
And somewhere in those memories is the young Dadaji and the love he once knew.
There is something tender about seeing love through the eyes of another generation. Courtship had its own language then. There was restraint, anticipation, a certain shyness. Love did not necessarily have to announce itself every five minutes. Sometimes a glance, a letter, a poem or simply the memory of someone’s presence could carry an entire relationship.
The older Dadaji carries that young man’s love inside him.
And suddenly I began wondering whether memory is perhaps kinder than history. Memory remembers the neighbour whose door we could knock on without first asking which religion he belonged to. That distinction sits quietly beneath Main Vaapas Aaunga.
The film took me back to the frightening reality of Partition and the way ordinary people were swept into a madness that seems almost impossible to comprehend when viewed from the safety of the present. Yet there are moments in the film when you can see that the people themselves are not initially eager to become monsters.
I was struck particularly by the young Keenu’s small act of protest. He simply refuses to go. He sits down on the ground in false stubbornness. It is almost insignificant.
And yet watch the people around him. They look at each other. There is discomfort. There is hesitation. They do not immediately become a murderous mob. There is some shoving, but even that seems tentative. One person who appears to have some authority within the group tells Keenu to leave and not create trouble.
For that moment, I could see the neighbours who existed before the mob. The human beings are still there. And that made the transformation even more frightening.
Because perhaps violence does not always begin with people deciding that they want to become violent. Sometimes it begins with people being told who they are supposed to hate, and slowly accepting that definition of themselves.
The film made me think about the absurd tragedy of Partition. People who had lived alongside one another suddenly found themselves required to choose sides. A country that had contained extraordinary diversity was divided, and ordinary people were left to carry the consequences.
History remembers borders. Memory remembers who brought us Eidi, who came home for Diwali, whose door we knocked on without asking which religion lived behind it.
Of course, decades have passed. We can continue pointing fingers at the British Empire, and there is certainly a history of colonial policies, political decisions and competing interests that must be understood. But after a while another question has to be asked.
What now?
If we remain permanently trapped in the quarrel, what have we actually learned?
There have been moments when India and Pakistan have tried to extend hands to each other. The history is not a simple story of one country reaching out while the other always refuses. There were the Indus Waters negotiations and treaty under Nehru and Ayub Khan. There was the Shimla Agreement after the 1971 war. Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto attempted to reopen dialogue. Vajpayee took that extraordinary bus ride from Delhi to Lahore in 1999, where he met Nawaz Sharif and the two countries signed the Lahore Declaration. Years later, Manmohan Singh continued the effort at dialogue and even spoke of a Treaty of Peace, Security and Friendship.
There have been hands from both sides. And yet the quarrel keeps returning. That is what troubles me. Two brothers can fight. Brothers have always fought. They can say terrible things to each other, refuse to speak, storm out of the house and remain angry for years.
But eventually one of them must ask: what exactly are we fighting for? And what happens when the hand extended in friendship is slapped away? Perhaps it is not even about who slapped it first anymore. Perhaps the question is whether either brother is willing to stop slapping.
There is a wonderful Panchatantra story about four wild cows. They remain together and therefore the lion cannot easily attack them. The lion waits. It allows suspicion and quarrelling to separate them. Once they are divided, each cow becomes vulnerable.
The lion does not have to defeat four cows. It only must wait for them to stop standing together. The story is simple, but its wisdom has survived for centuries. And I could not help wondering about our own subcontinent. Who benefits when neighbours remain permanently suspicious of one another?
Not necessarily one secret villain sitting somewhere and pulling strings. The machinery of hostility is much larger than that. There are political interests, military establishments, arms industries, strategic calculations, fear, nationalism and generations of inherited suspicion. There are people and institutions for whom permanent tension has consequences very different from those suffered by the ordinary family living near a border.
The people who lose are usually the ones who simply want to live. They want their children to grow up. They want to work. They want to celebrate a festival. They want to visit an old friend. They want to remember the house their grandparents once lived in. They want to break bread.
And perhaps that is why the film’s humour matters.
Keenu’s grandson’s stand-up comedy provides a moment when we can laugh, perhaps even wipe away a tear, and then breathe again. It is not a grand political solution. It is not a treaty. It is not a summit. It is simply a young person finding a way to make people laugh. And perhaps that is how reconciliation sometimes begins—not with forgiveness of everything overnight, but with the ability to sit together without hostility.
Perhaps the first step is not friendship, but tolerance followed by conversation and maybe laughter. And perhaps, the eventuality of friendship. That remains a hope in the hearts of people who peace over chaos.
The younger generation has a difficult inheritance. They should know what happened. Forgetting history is dangerous. But remembering history and inheriting its hatred are not necessarily the same thing.
We can teach our children about Partition without teaching them to hate the people on the other side of the border. That is perhaps one of the most painful things about Partition—the knowledge that the “other” was not always other.
Dadaji’s dementia makes this even more painful because his mind seems to wander back to a world before that name became important. Perhaps he does not understand why he cannot simply go home. Perhaps some part of him has preserved a simpler truth: this was my home, these were my people, this was my life.
And maybe the rest of us, with perfectly functioning memories, have forgotten something he still carries. That we can belong to different faiths and still belong to one another. We can pray differently and still sit at the same table. We can celebrate different festivals and still exchange sweets. We can carry different gods in our hearts and still carry affection for the person sitting opposite us. We can break bread together with our brothers in camaraderie. That should not be such a revolutionary idea.
And then the film returns to love.
The reading of the poem to his lover’s photograph felt almost like a closure—not merely to Dadaji’s personal story but to everything the film had been quietly asking about memory. I have always felt that poetry is most powerful when it comes through the poet’s own voice. There is something intimate about hearing the person who wrote the words give them breath. Here, the words of Jiya, the woman he loved, return in a kind of loop through Keenu’s mind.
The photograph remains.
The poem remains.
The voice remains.
The person is gone.
And I thought of all our gile-shikve. All the things we carry as though they are permanent possessions. How terribly important they seem while we are alive, and how completely meaningless they become when there is no tomorrow in which to carry them.
And suddenly all the things that seemed so enormous during life—arguments, grievances, borders, political identities, old wounds—seem very small. What remains is love.
Perhaps that is why the poem stayed with me more than the violence.
I began watching Main Vaapas Aaunga thinking I was watching a story about Partition. I came away thinking about memory.
About what dementia takes away and what it strangely preserves.
About the memories of people who survived Partition—memories that can contain both nostalgia and nightmares. They remember the homes they lost, the friends they left behind, the ordinary happiness of neighbourhood life. But they also remember mobs, bloodshed, fear and the terrible moment when people stopped seeing one another as human beings.
We can choose not to keep feeding the quarrel simply because generations before us could not resolve it.
We can choose to ask whether peace is weakness or whether it requires far greater courage than war. And perhaps we can look again at those hands extended across the border. Not as political gestures. Not as victories. A hand that is accepted with understood and healed sorrows.
Because surely, at some point, two neighbours must become tired of standing outside each other’s doors. The film leaves me with a question I don’t quite know how to answer.
When two peoples remain locked in hostility for generations, when old wounds are repeatedly reopened and sorrow is passed down like an inheritance, who gains from perpetuating the quarrel?
The four cows in the Panchatantra did not need to know the lion’s name. They only needed to understand that they were safer together. Perhaps that is what we keep forgetting.
And perhaps Dadaji, in the strange landscape of his failing memory, remembers it better than we do.
He wants to go home. He remembers love. He remembers friendship. He remembers a world in which different people could sit together and break bread. Maybe the question is not whether we should forget Partition. Maybe the question is:
What should we remember from it—and what should we finally be willing to let go?
Credit: In Convo with Goosey (AI Powered ChatGPT)
Itinerant Storyteller 