Main Vaapas Aaunga writer Nayanika Mahtani reveals Imtiaz Ali met a 90-year-old who said 'Take me back to Pakistan'

Aaj bhi jaise Gaza mei Iran mei strife aur conflict hai but there are people falling in love getting married and harbouring dreams Life doesnt stop History is always seen from the perspectives of oppressors and victims But what about the ordinary person Theres so much richness even in that ordinariness is how authorscreenwriter Nayanika Mahtanis views history Naturally this extended to her approach towards Main Vaapas Aaunga which she wrote withdirector Imtiaz AliOver a 90minute call from her home in London Mahtani speaks to midday about weaving the timelessness of a love story with the lasting aftereffects of the Partition paying a tribute to the generation of quiet heroes the alternate ending and how through the film Imtiaz walked her back homeQ How have these weeks been for youFor me this has been such a deeply personal journey because all four of my grandparents were refugees in the Partition And this was my way of finishing the conversation that I never had the chance to finish with them So my last novel Across the Line is also rooted in the Partition I was supposed to write a different story but that was the story that kept coming to me I think stories choose us It was just a chance meeting with Imtiaz in Dehradun actually and then in Mussoorie and I gave him a copy of my bookAnd it just so happened that he also had a partition story in mind and he asked me to write 2030 pages on his idea That became Main Vaapas Aaunga Stories choose the people who are going to tell them And I feel very fortunate that I was chosen to tell the story because its so deeply personalQ What was the idea that Imtiaz had in mindThat there was an old man who wanted to go back to Pakistan to his ancestral village to complete something that was unfinished for him But he is not able to and he is in his 90s and sick Imtiaz told me this idea when I made a trip to Mumbai from London By then he had read my book He told me Your Partition story is really nice but its not got everything that I want to tell in the story Im thinking about Thatrsquos when he narrated to me this idea and we started working on it I sent him the 2030 pages on it and he wrote back saying We are onI was of course thrilled to be telling a Partition story and that too with the sensibility that Imtiaz brings to it because I was very clear that I didnt want to tell a story where there would be the lsquootherrsquo or the lsquoothernessrsquo I would rather not tell a story than tell that kind of a story So I was just fortunate that this opportunity came my wayWith Main Vaapas Aaunga my question about what my purpose is has been answered I have finished this conversation with my grandparents And I feel not only for them but also for the millions of others like them who never got a chance to tell their story It was a generation of quiet heroes They just wordlessly erased their past to build our future And for them grief was like a luxury They were refugees They had to just look for the next dayQ Among the several moments that stand out in the film is the argument between Nirvair Diljit Dosanjh and Pali Dadaji when he inquires about the last time the latter and Keenu aka Ishar Grewal Vedang Raina later Naseeruddin Shah went to Pakistan Pali shoots back asking lsquoTumhe kyun janna hairsquo And says on the lines lsquoAgar tumhe aaj yeh waqt ke baare mei batayenge toh tum nafrat samjhoge ek kaum ki doosri kaum se Par woh kuch our tharsquo That speaks for the times that we live in in the country and globally He wants that poison to pass away with themThen Nirvair asks him lsquoAapko lagta hai woh zeher aapke saath chala jayega ya humare andar rahe jayegarsquo Both sides are right in their own way Whenever we look at past conflicts we are always choosing sides Itrsquos always about who started it Palirsquos fear is valid But so is Nirvairrsquos because he is talking about the perils of intergenerational traumaHow did you arrive at this sceneSo my nani comes from Sargodha in Pakistan She grew up there At the age of 17 or so she was married off to my nanaji who had a government job in DelhiWhen 1947 happened my nanis family her parents her brothers they refused to leave Sargodha Their lives were saved by their Muslim neighbours And their whole life they lived in Sargodha till they died while my nani stayed in India this side of the border separated from her family for the rest of her life My nanis brothers were called Jiya and Pali So Pali Dadaji whom we are talking about came from there And her other brother was Jiya who was actually Indrajeet but they used to call him Jiya But Imtiaz said lets make the girlrsquos name Jiya SharvariWhenever my nani spoke about Sargodha she talked about only happy memories There was never bitterness There was never rancour And imagine how many reasons she had to be bitterMy dadi came from Lahore my dada came from Rawalpindi So they all came from different parts And they left behind such rich lives and rebuilt from scratch after living in refugee camps Their best friends remained Muslims I have never seen in that generation an ounce of rancour So when we were telling this story even Imtiaz had the same sensibility that there was no othernessThere was that lsquoMartianrsquo The best of humanity and the worst of humanity came forward And this is what we wanted to show That it was not anything else It was not about religion It was just about that moment and what a human is capable of doing The best and the worstAnd this intergenerational trauma I cant tell you You said it and people have said it in so many different ways Earlier I used to think I was losing my mind because the first scene I got before I wrote Across the Line was of a young boy playing pitthu in a gully that I had never seen I had never been to this gully And that boy became the story that was Across the Line And I know that boy was my grandfather because that boy had a tattoo on his forearm My grandfather had a tattoo on his forearm And his tattoo said Tarlok who was his best friend in schoolHe used to tell us One day Tarlok and I ran away from school He wrote my name I wrote his name Then all of us cousins used to ask him Papaji where did Tarlok go He used to say He is a scoundrel I dont know where he isMany years later when I was doing the research for my novel my aunt who is now in her late 80s told me that Tarlok died in the riots and Papaji had made up the story that he didnrsquot know where he was Maybe that story was just for us or maybe his own survival mechanism It was such a vital memory of all our growing up that Tarlok was on his forearm written in Urdu because he only read Urdu as he had grown up in RawalpindiIn our film Ishar Grewal is not a nice man Hes a bitter man But look at what he went through And this is where closure comes because we just judged them on what we saw but there was something they didnt talk aboutThere was something that never got mentioned So many of them dealt with PTSD But nobody was going to talk about it because independence coincided with partition and that took centre stage So you were not allowed to be unhappy But imagine on that independence eve every year what they would have thoughtQ The generation that went through Partition is perhaps in its last leg We dont know if well actually get to hear stories from them five years or ten years from now In that context Main Vaapas Aunga becomes vital as therersquos some documentationExactly I keep telling people I know that if they still have the chance to take their parents and grandparents to the film because this would be the biggest gift to have the opportunity to have them see the tribute to them In fact Imtiaz knew this old gentleman who is still alive I think hes in his mid90s and he is the one who one day sat in the car and said ldquoMujhe le chalo Pakistanrdquo So we are happy that we could make this film while he is alive Unfortunately now this whole generation some have dementia we donrsquot know how much we are even able to get across but we wanted to attempt this tributeOn this note dementia was such a fitting lens to tell the story of Partition because it doesnt make sense Itrsquos senseless What we remember is also sort of fractured You dont know whether it happened or itrsquos your memory if itrsquos reconstructed if you have made this up to survive There are so many aspects to it which gave dementia that perfect lens almost like a tragicomic lens to tell the storyIll tell you a little anecdote So this was the unfinished conversation with my dadaji I grew up in Kolkata but my dadaji and family when they came to this side lived in a little farm in North India where they rebuilt their lives So every summer vacation we used to go to the farm I would sit with him in his study and he would read a book to me He had many books in Urdu He was one of those freedom fighters He had gone to jail with Nehru and Gandhi He was into street theater So he was also a very good storytellerI must have been 10 or 11 This one afternoon he started telling me the story of Toba Tek Singh I remember thinking at that time that it was such a silly story Halfway through he stopped reading and just broke down I didnt know what to do So I went to call my dadi My dadi came into the room and I remember watching from the door She was comforting him like he was a little boy He had his head in her lap And she was just saying lsquoLet it go Bury itrsquo That evening I hid that book I didnt ask why he cried I just hid that book because I didnt want him to cry again But I still regret that why I didnrsquot ask him about it Then I grew up and got consumed with my own life in that selfish way that we all do And now that has come back that unprocessed thinghellip I dont know where its come from But it obviously has been there inside me waiting to come outWhen I saw the rough cut of the film I was alone This was Imtiazrsquos office But when I watched it I felt the presence of my grandparents And it happened not only with me So many people have shared thatQ Did at any stage you and Imtiaz think that dementia could be a risky route to take considering much of what he is saying is gibberish and the film shows us what he means only through flashbacksIt is a risk but sometimes you just have to trust that its emotional impact would come through And it wasnrsquot an intellectual thing for us We knew emotionally it would connect Partition itself is such a heavy topic and Imtiaz was very clear that the Partition was not the protagonist It was Ishar Grewal Itrsquos going to be his story and Partition is a backdrop At the same time we wanted to convey what that generation had gone through We thought that we could do it through Isharrsquos tragicomic recounting After that really heavy scene about the women when Diljit asks him ldquoKahan gayi wo aurtein He says ldquoMexicordquoIts not totally unrelated because there were carriages and horses in the flashback scene But you feel a sigh of relief because the earlier scene was so heavy We wanted to give gravitas to everything he was saying but at the same time a certain lightness Otherwise this can become a very heavy watch And Imtiaz was clear from the beginning that this is not going to be a docu on the partitionQ Where did the thought of the Martian come fromThe old man that Imtiaz had spoken to he had mentioned Martians Martians took away the otherness It was not a Hindu or a Muslim It was a Martian It was what somebody became and they werent humanQ Whats the story behind the Chaand BaaliSo I have a very good friend in Pakistan She is an actor Her name is Nadia Jamil She once brought me this beautiful pair of Chaand Baalis I had gone to drop my daughter to her university and ek meri baali wahan gir gayi I spent about two hours looking for it I loved it so muchThis was so much on my mind that when I gave the first draft to Imtiaz I had mentioned in it Jiya ki chaand baali gir gayi He loved the chaand baali aspect of it He said Isko rakhenge but we will make it fall in kachhi dalanQ What was the idea behind introducing Nirvair to the story and drawing parallels between his and Keenus journeysWe knew we had to find a way to make it relevant to the younger generation and also to say that this is not a story that has a clean ending This is a wound thats still festering The feeling of leaving something behind is universal whether its your house or identityQ If theres one recurring criticism about Imtiazs films its the way he writes his women Many complain that the women in his films however empowered exist to further the arc of the male protagonists Some have also felt the need for a female gaze in his films Main Vaapas Aaunga is the first film Imtiaz has collaborated with a female screenwriter on What has your experience been as his collaborator And what do you make of this criticismHaving two daughters I was very keen to tell the story that also gives the female gaze enough weightage We would have these conversations and if you have noticed Jiya is actually the protector Even when she sees the mob coming she pushes Keenu down and says Koi aapko haath lagake toh dikhade Its so different from that typical toxic male Punjabi man who will always be in command and thats the kind of man that we are seeing aroundI feel Imtiaz is very respectful of the women in his life and movies He gives them a very respectful and empowered gaze especially in this movie Its Jiya who calls the shots She is Keenus protector not just in that scene but also when they come out to the family Its a lot about consent Even in the scene when he is feeling bad about what he has done and he is all awkward she says What if we get married Its such a healthy message about consent and respect for womenEven with Meher Anjana Sukhani I requested Imtiaz saying Lets not make her out to be a grabby daughterinlaw And he told me Dont worry She is going to be the darling of the show She will be the caregiver She will be a moophat but with the best heart And thats how she came across She is the one who is in the hospital She is saying things that the men of the family have said to her behind closed doors like the thing about will etc So she is outing her husband by talking about it in front of his brother She is the heart of the film and she lends that lightness to the filmAnd then the whole curse of the women angle There was another conversation we had that let this not be only about the survivors guilt because the first people who bore the brunt of the Partition were women Imtiaz is such an amazing listener and has such deep empathy that he takes on board every aspect and gives it the due weightageQ This aspect of the curse of the women was this your ideaNo it was already there with Imtiaz We had to flesh it out in a way that becomes an interesting part of the story and create a world around itThe scene that we had in the film about what happened with those women we didnt show even a per cent of what really happened in real life We went through many interviews of the Partition survivors We didnt want to make it too gore but I can tell you that this was not even the worst of what actually happened This was a watereddown version of many instances of what actually happened It was just terrible what those people went through and sawQ Yet they didnt carry hate in their heartsCan you imagine that I think they saw that inturn the victims were the aggressors It wasnt onesided They saw that I remember I was speaking to some people at one of the screenings and they said Why would we want to go back to something that we took a lifetime to forget Its so hard for them to watch it So you have to be careful while making something like thisBut I feel overwhelmingly the film has been something that has brought closure and a tribute to those livesQ Such a scene in the wrong hands can lead the audience to rage and hateAbsolutely In this scene itself we also see Aftab Keenus friend dying We also see Muzaffar Manish Chaudhari kill Afzal Danish Pandor One thing both Imtiaz and I were very certain about I told him We have to have a scene where we see Muslims being killed So that scene in the train where Keenus hat falls off and the one when the train arrives at the Lahore station and Afzal finds his whole family dead So we see both sides and theres a balanced view Otherwise it can be ragebaitThis is the view that we saw with our grandparents and thats what we wanted to honourQ Though its not in the film did you imagine what Jiyas life would have been postPartitionWe have seen Jiya only through the eyes of Keenu We never saw her grow up because he didnt see her grow up She is a figment of his imagination So we dont go older with her because he doesnt want to go older with her We had actually thought about him finding Jiya But then we decided against it because she is as unattainable as Sargodha is