Review: Main Vaapas Aaunga: This return was heavy
Vrunda Pathare

17th August 1947 was the day when the exact border lines drawn between India and Pakistan were revealed to the public. This review of Imtiaz Ali’s film, Main Vaapas Aaunga is being published here today to mark the 80th year of that announcement. Written by Archivist, Vrunda Pathare, the review is reproduced from her blog (see link below). The oral historian will publish reviews of films, books and performances that focus on memory and history. This review engages with memory by considering the dynamic of what is remembered in fragments seventy years after the Partition of India and what is forgotten because of dementia. This post also reflects on the processes of recollection when dementia alters the course of daily life, reminding us of the fragility and vulnerability of human experience. ~ The Oral Historian

” For an experienced event is finite at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite – because it is only a key to everything that happened before or after it.”

~ Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”.

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I went to watch Main Vaapas Aaunga today expecting a love story set against the backdrop of Partition. What I walked out with was something heavier — a story about loss, which I have always found to be the most under-examined of traumas. We have language for grief, for heartbreak, for nostalgia. We have very little language for loss itself: the slow, structural absence of something that simply isn’t there anymore, and the strange shapes it forces a life to take around it.

The film begins with an old man, Ishar Singh Grewal, losing his memory. But dementia, in this story, does not erase so much as it excavates. As the recent layers of his mind dissolve, what surfaces instead are the oldest ones — a home in Sargodha he left behind decades ago, and a love, Afsana, that Partition made impossible. His grandson Nirvair, who has flown in from the UK expecting to sit by a dying man’s bed, instead finds himself the sole listener to a memory no one else in the family was ever given access to. And that, I think, is the film’s quietest and cruellest observation: that the people physically closest to us are often the furthest from our deepest rooms. Ishar’s own family is, in a sense, made up of strangers – not through any failure of love, but because they were never present for the version of him that this memory belongs to. Identity, the film suggests, isn’t just shaped by memory; it’s confined in it.

What I loved in the film is that it doesn’t leave Nirvair working on instinct alone. He eventually goes looking for corroboration for what his grandfather is trying to say in those broken, illogical fragments — the way memory often works in dementia. He visits the Partition Museum, sits with historians and memory keepers, and starts using old photographs to anchor and prompt the memories Ishar can no longer organize on his own. It’s a small but precise detail, because it’s exactly the methodology oral historians use with elderly or memory-impaired narrators: a face, a street, an object as a retrieval cue, since a photograph can sometimes unlock what a direct question cannot. It is fiction folding into something archivists like me do every day — insisting that fragments of memory are still worth chasing down before they go silent. Though he doesn’t have the luxury of time an archivist usually has — a second sitting, room to cross-reference, time to let the material settle before drawing conclusions — he simply stays inside the disorder long enough for a pattern to surface on its own terms. And that, not coincidentally, is the only way a story like this was ever going to be recoverable at all.

That’s also where the film’s real subject reveals itself. It isn’t really a romance. It’s an excavation of what happens when love is severed from its object and given nowhere to go… when it can’t be spoken, mourned, or even properly remembered by the people around you. Love like that doesn’t fade. It turns inward and, as the film puts it, becomes something closer to poison: not because the love itself was wrong, but because it was never allowed to complete its sentence.

Watching this film, I was pulled straight back to Aspinwall House, Kochi, that I visited in February 2017 — to Raúl Zurita’s The Sea of Pain, the Chilean poet’s installation at the third Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Zurita had filled a long warehouse with knee-deep seawater, and visitors had to wade through it to reach his poem at the far wall, written for Galip Kurdi — the older brother of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old whose death in the Mediterranean became the photograph that briefly made the world look at the refugee crisis. Galip drowned the same day, in the same sea. But there is no photograph of him. No iconic image, no global outcry with his name attached. Zurita’s installation was, in part, an act of insisting on the boy nobody mourned.

What I have never been able to shake about that piece is its structure, not just its content. Walking toward the poem, wading through that shallow, knee-length water, felt almost playful — a novelty, a curiosity, something you would photograph. It was only once you had read the poem, once you understood what and who the water actually represented, that the walk back transformed. The same water that had felt like nothing on the way in suddenly had weight on the way out. Your feet were heavier not because the physical conditions had changed, but because you now knew what you were walking through. Zurita built grief into the architecture of the experience itself: you couldn’t simply witness the sorrow, you had to carry it bodily, in both directions, and the second crossing is the one that actually teaches you something.

Main Vaapas Aaunga does something structurally similar, just stretched across two hours instead of one warehouse. You go in expecting the “fun” crossing the romance, the period setting, the old-world ache that trailers promise. You don’t realize until much later that you are, in fact, in the middle of the sea. By the time the film delivers you to its end, to Ishar’s resurfaced memory of Sargodha and Afsana, the weight has already accumulated. The walk back out of the theatre is the heavier one. You don’t feel the full cost of displacement, of a love interrupted, until you are already past the point where you can simply look away.

Both works, in their own ways, are about the same unresolved question: is home a place, or is it a person? Ishar’s “home” was never really Sargodha as geography. It was Sargodha as the place where Afsana existed, where a particular version of himself was last fully alive. Once that was severed, no amount of distance or time could relocate him; he simply carried an internal, untranslatable elsewhere for the rest of his life, visible to no one until dementia finally cracked the seal. Galip Kurdi’s home, in the same way, was not a country he could return to. It had already ceased to be retrievable, and the sea that took him became, grotesquely, the only “home” the world was willing to remember him by, and even that only through his brother’s name.

Displacement, both works insist, isn’t only geographic. It’s the loneliness of holding an entire world inside you that the people standing next to you cannot see, let alone enter. That feeling of being surrounded and still profoundly alone with what you’ve lost, is, I think, the real sea of pain. Not the water itself, but the knowledge you bring back out of it, which you now have to carry for the rest of the way home.

Vrunda Pathare is a scholar of matter, memory, and media as a part of her Ph.D. at Flame University, Pune. She heads the Godrej Archives at Godrej Enterprises Group. Former President of the Oral History Association of India, Vrunda also serves as Secretary of the Steering Committee of the Business Archives Section of the International Council on Archives. Trained in history (University of Mumbai) and in records management (National Archives of India), Vrunda’s professional interests spans business archives, oral history, object histories, and archival education. Beyond archiving, she writes about films, food, art, and poetry on her blog: randomgiriblog.wordpress.com where this post first appeared.

References:

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History, ” Hannah Arendt ed. H. Zohn trans. Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 257