Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga revolves around a dying Partition survivor whose dementia gives him the agency to remember. And he remembers everything in the language of nothing. He remembers the past that he had to erase in service of a future. He remembers the fault-lines before the borders. He remembers his boundless student years in Sargodha: where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs lived together before they were made to feel like Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. He remembers the girl he fell for before their faith mutated into interfaith; he remembers her as a romantic who behaves like a literary figure from a book whose ink is fading. He remembers the adventures of ‘Keenu’ and ‘Jiya’ back when their actual names, Ishar and Afsana, were secondary sounds of identity. He remembers the hopeful isolations of their fantasy before it was infiltrated by the whims of reality. And he remembers a part of himself that loved for the sake of loving.
A 75-year-old Naseeruddin Shah plays this 95-year-old Sikh man hallucinating on his deathbed. He spends his last days wading through scattered memories and broken phrases from a story that only his NRI grandson, Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh), tries to understand. Shah’s character can be seen as a poignant allegory for many things. Like the film itself, which reframes the toil of deciphering as the art of listening; Keenu’s innocent truth is displaced by ruthless history, and Nirvair is the modern viewer who thinks he’s hearing a harmless love story. Or like the film’s director, Imtiaz Ali, a storyteller whose evolution is rooted in a desire to say goodbye to previous versions of himself. Or like a country, which still struggles to transmit the humanity of history through the politicisation of its consequences.
But there’s something more to his performance. It’s more than just the physicality of playing a man whose vacant gaze conveys the softness of longing and the violence of belonging. Or the way his eyes depict how the delusions of dementia contain more lucidity than the trappings of everyday expression. It’s more than the stillness of a body being consumed by the motion of memory. It’s more than his brow fixating on a thought as if it were an entity in the room. At some level, the credibility of this character is rooted in the authenticity of the performer. It’s as primal as watching an aging legend address his transience through a farewell-coded role. The craft is beyond doubt, but the rendition feels personal.
