Main Vaapas Aaunga

It has been a week since the end credits rolled for Imtiaz Ali’s Main Wapas Aaunga, but the film has been playing non-stop inside my head and heart. It has been peeling itself, layer by layer, to reveal the nuances that might have been missed when you were bawling your heart out for a love lost, and people displaced. This is the second movie this year to pay spiritual homage to Sargodha — the first was Sriram Raghavan’s tender anti-war film Ikkis, about war hero Arul Khetarpal. I confess I saw the movie through the many stories of escape I had heard in my six years (1997-2003) in Delhi, living in Old Rajinder Nagar, one of the colonies the refugees settled in. Many Papajis and Maajis still shed salty tears for their Pind, for the people, potted plants and property they left behind, never to return to. As we knitted on chill winter mornings when the sun played peekaboo, the creases on Maaji’s face softened, and yet another past memory resurfaced.

In a scene during Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga, when Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) takes the stage at an open mic in London, I braced myself. In my head, Ali is notorious for dipping his toes in subcultures he considers ‘hip and trendy’ (like stand-up comedy here, fresco painting in 2009’s Love Aaj Kal) – including them as passing details in a film, never to be brought up again. Over here, it’s used to establish Nirvair as a young wastrel (from a wealthy family in Amritsar) coasting through life. He can’t stick to a job for more than two months, he can’t commit to his girlfriend, Kaveri (Banita Sandhu). His father (Rajat Kapoor) asks, “Why do you keep running?” – a narrative failsafe, lest the metaphor be lost on someone unfamiliar with an escapist Imtiaz Ali protagonist.

Survivors of Partition could never truly move on as the horrors it brought on continued to haunt their hearts for the rest of their days. So did the hope to see their home once in their lifetime. They never really believed they won’t be able to return ever again. I’ve heard of the displacement and a desire to revisit their home in stories of my grandparent-in-laws. They, like many others, on both sides of the border, died without getting their wish fulfilled. Scenes of burying their wealth in the backyard with hopes of reclaiming it on return, fleeing bloodthirsty foes on the other side with the help of friends from the same community or women wearing a vial of poison around their necks in the event of violent mob attacks, days and days of uncertainty spent in camps would become stories of staying alive. One that flocks of homeless and heartbroken refugees, like my relatives, would remember and remind generations to come.

Partition, in any form, is never merely a political event; it is an enduring human catastrophe. It leaves behind not only severed geographies but also ruptured hearts, fractured identities, and generations condemned to inherit memories of loss. Time, often celebrated as the great healer, may soften the sharp edges of grief, but it cannot erase the scars carved into the collective consciousness of those who lived through such devastation. Those wounds remain buried beneath the surface, dormant yet alive, capable of reopening with the slightest provocation, unleashing once again the sorrow of a world violently torn apart.

Six months later, we’re back in Sargodha. Main Vaapas Aaunga journeys to the same Pakistani city Dharmendra visits in Ikkis. Both journeys represent the last wish of a man at the end of his life; both are weighed down by history but lifted by the idea of shared humanity. It’s quite a coincidence that Sriram Raghavan and Imtiaz Ali zeroed in on the same place for a similar purpose—but then Ali’s cinema has always been powered by blind chance. Even as this film rises to a crescendo, Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) pauses to tell a doubter, “So what if it’s a coincidence? Coincidences happen in life.”

A sweeping, bittersweet examination of displacement, Main Vaapas Aaunga is a timely, intimate, poetic character study about how geopolitical lines permanently alter the trajectory of human hearts. Imtiaz Ali’s filmography is built around characters who travel in search of their souls. Here, he evolves from his road movies and, together with co-writer Nayanika Mehtani, grounds this obsession in the tragedy of Partition, turning his lens toward the refugee crisis, where transit is no longer a choice of self-exploration, but a desperate battle for survival.