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Main Vaapas Aaunga is a masterclass in how memory works. Don’t look at it as a hit or flop

Imtiaz Ali's Main Vaapas Aaunga isn’t your typical Partition film. It isn’t about victimhood, or a yearning to return to the homeland or about people caught in harrowing cycles of hate. It is more complex.

Main Vaapas Aaunga maybe struggling at the box office. But it will be inadequate to judge the latest Imtiaz Ali film through the hit-or-flop lens. It is more than just another Partition drama. It is a window into how memory works.

Many among the generation that crossed the bloodied India-Pakistan border are probably at the dementia stage of their lives now. As an oral historian, I noticed how Ali portrays fraying memory, unstructured remembering and the late surfacing of trauma. He has hand-crafted the fragility of the recurrent and intermittent hallucinatory images that haunt the male protagonist Keenu, played by Naseeruddin Shah, in his senior years—the swish and swaying laburnum trees; secret lovers’ meetings in Sargodha ruins; a missing earring; an unread poem; dancing masked Martians; and bicycling through the narrow lanes.

Memory is made of just a handful of unceasing flashes of images that come at him as he lies helplessly on his death bed. He mumbles some words again and again. For an untrained ear, it comes across as gibberish. That’s how it is for Keenu’s family members at first.

But this is how memory works. Many oral history sessions that I have conducted with senior citizens in the US and India taught me one thing: People don’t remember meta histories of big events as keenly. They hold on to intimate memories of their lives that are entangled in the larger incidents of a nation’s history. Ali captures that intensely.

I consider this film a masterclass in the discipline of memory studies.

Also read: Sindhis have been missing in India’s Partition story. Now, they finally get an exhibition

Main Vaapas Aaunga is a break from the formulaic retelling of Partition stories that has come to dominate our textbooks and scholarship. It isn’t a political history of Partition. It isn’t about victimhood. It isn’t just a yearning to return to the homeland of one’s childhood or about people caught in harrowing cycles of hate. It is more complex.

Imtiaz Ali’s central predicament in the movie isn’t about how to view Partition. It’s about what to do with memory itself.

The memory caught in the cyclical loop of a dementia patient—its relentless, repeated return in broken fragments. For an older person dealing with dementia, memory is neither linear, logical nor complete. It isn’t unadulterated either. Sometimes it’s even a James Joycean stream of consciousness. It is often repetitive. And this repetition is an act of fortifying one’s claim on a version of history.

Naseeruddin Shah’s character remembers his lover but also Martians, the moon, and the rocket landing. He remembers directions to his lover’s home and the neighbourhood church as if he is still cycling through those lanes. There is a fluid motion to his retelling.

Keenu doesn’t regard himself as a victim........

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