In my last column, I had written about Majid Majidi's Baran (Rain, Iran, 2001). The novelty of this quiet masterpiece was watching the film in Farsi, with Marathi subtitles. But, revisiting it after nearly 20 years (it is freely available online), I was reminded why it is still so sharply relevant worldwide, especially in today's India which, through the government's handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, has reduced us to a nation of millions of 'refugees'; only, they are from and in our own nation. According to thewire.in, India's internally displaced persons because of COVID-19 is "at least double" that of "Partition, (when) 15 million people were uprooted from their homes."

There are so many layers to Baran. It's a refugee story. It's a wordless romance. It's a political comment on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and rise of the Taliban, that caused 1.5 million Afghan refugees to flee to Iran. It's a gender-bender story, about a woman who dresses as a man to get a job in Iran.