The year was 2007, I suppose – the year of leaving school, stepping into the realm of the unknown, the first whiff of freedom, and of experiencing life in ways which would become the stories of our tomorrow. And the only thing I went armed with, into the brave new world was an almost utopian belief in the image of the Rajs and Rahuls. A desire to find a similar grand or fairytale-like quality in my own pursuit of love, or what would be.
And then one day, this Bollywood-obsessed, hero-worshipping girl met another dimpled man on screen, a man straddling two worlds in The Namesake.
Always quick to fall for the eyes, this new man’s long, deep stare captivated me. The simplicity of the smile stood in stark contrast to the grandeur of another dimpled smile that seduced me since adolescence.
When I first watched The Namesake, I didn’t quite fathom the effect it would have on me again, much later in life. I appreciated the movie as a piece of good cinema. But that’s about it. Ashima and Ashoke’s love story failed to move me the way Raj and Simran’s did.
But that was in 2007.
I watched The Namesake again, after a few years. Nursing adulthood’s first heartbreak, I sat down to watch the movie just as one would watch a classic.
And then I saw what I missed seeing in 2007 – the absolute magic of Ashima and Ashoke. Their relationship growing and flowering out of the mundane. The tenderness with which, after years of being married to each other, during a walk in Victoria Memorial, Ashima tells her husband “You want me to say I love you?” And a visibly embarrassed Ashoke, flashing his warmest smile.
The goodbyes in the film that a wife bids to the husband and vice versa happen in silences and nods. Without elaborate promises of love, those goodbyes just conveyed assurances of coming back home to each other. Ashoke and Ashima stitched their love with tenderness and companionship.
Ashoke Ganguli didn’t express his affection for his wife with words or songs in praise of his beloved. He simply held his wife’s hand during a typical Indian family visit to the Taj Mahal, when two simple, ordinary people, with mundane lives stole a moment together and sat watching the grandest expression of love.
And while watching this other dimpled man make Ashoke his own, a girl grew up to a woman who gradually understood the poetry in the prosaic. The importance of turning back and saying bye to the woman looking out of the window.
It was Irrfan Khan who silently taught me that life is for the celebration of the Ashokes, and fiction for the Rajs.
The girl in me would fondly remember the Rajs that came and went while the woman looks out for the Ashoke.
Life’s biggest lesson from cinema for me has been from another Khan. Irrfan Khan.
PS: Actor Irrfan Khan died at the age of 53 on April 29, 2020 of a colon infection. Today marks six months since Khan left a void among his many admirers.
The writer is a Delhi based journalist.
