Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ starts off as a film about a dying Sikh nonagenarian mentally reverting to being a young man passionately in love with a beautiful woman. He was forced to part with her during the India-Pakistan partition. Then, suddenly, in the second half of the film, the attention shifts to how the men in his family had left all their women behind at a Muslim ally’s home during violent partition riots, hoping to come back for them when the heat dies. Unfortunately nobody reunites. Neither the lovers, nor the family.
Director Imtiaz Ali has a fascination with pitting modern romance against historical love stories, so the first half of his 2026 film ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ feels like his attempt at a ‘Love Aaj Kal 3’, this time contrasting an aspiring stand-up comedian’s 2020s ‘situationship’ with his dying grandfather’s longing for a lover he left behind in Sargodha due to the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition. All of this is backed up by an excellent musical score.
Naseeruddin Shah plays Ishar Singh, the dying patriarch of a wealthy Punjabi family, longing to return to Pakistan to meet his first love. Vedang Raina plays his younger self, known as Keenu, a student courting his classmate Afsana (Sharvari). Ishar’s attempted trip across the border lands him in the hospital, so his grandson Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) flies from the UK to see him one last time. An increasingly incoherent Ishar mistakes Nirvair for an old friend, launching him on a mission to uncover who his grandfather wanted to meet in Sargodha, since it’s apparently the only thing keeping the old man alive.
The reason I am writing this review a few days late is because it took me four days to finish watching ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’; the first hour was especially challenging to get through. For a second, it even made me wonder if I had something against Imtiaz Ali, especially since, unlike most Bollywood fans, I don’t get the hype around ‘Jab We Met’. But then I remembered: I loved Ali’s ‘Amar Singh Chamkila’, which had Diljit Dosanjh as the titular lead. But Dosanjh’s character in ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ feels like he gets far more screen time than necessary. Rajat Kapoor as Nirvair’s strict father leaves a stronger impression.
In its nearly three-hour runtime, ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ attempts to tell three stories. One is about the job-hopping NRI Nirvair, who not only can’t stick to one job but also struggles to make a serious commitment to the girl he is ‘seeing’ (because they aren’t even girlfriend-boyfriend yet). The second follows Ishar Singh’s first love with Afsana just before Partition, while the third deals with his family continuing to carry the trauma of Partition and their failure to protect the women in their family.
Imtiaz Ali does the most justice to the Ishar-Afsana love story, even though the onscreen chemistry between Vedang Raina and Sharvari isn’t crackling or memorable. Their performances often felt like they were doing a college theater play, somewhere between good and bad. Nirvair’s subplot about finding his own identity comes across as a distraction, while the horrors faced by his female ancestors during Partition feel exploitative. I’ll elaborate on that in the next paragraph.
The cruel irony is that the women of the family suffer the film’s most horrifying fate, yet ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ seems far less interested in their lives than in what their deaths mean to the men who survive them. Most of these women appear only fleetingly in the first half, we barely get to know them. So when the story finally reveals the gut-wrenching truth of what happened to them, it feels like a blatant attempt to milk viewers’ emotions. If you’re not going to give us any chapters from their lives, you shouldn’t get to simply write their endings. The ending is powerful, yes, but it feels like the ending to a different movie, not this one.
And perhaps that treatment wouldn’t bother me quite as much if the film suggested that the surviving men had actually learned or done something from all that suffering. In the opening minutes of ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’, Ishar is headed out when his daughter-in-law sweetly offers to serve him buttered parathas, to which he sarcastically retorts, “Butter as much as you want, you won’t inherit anything more.” I chuckled at the scene because, c’mon, a lot of wealthy families are all about inheritance disputes. But by the second half, that little joke turns sour. Ishar may carry enormous grief over what happened to the women in his family, but apparently, none of it taught him to treat the women kindly.
Naseeruddin Shah anchors the film with a strong, powerful performance as a dying old man desperately hoping to reunite with his first love. If only Imtiaz Ali had chosen to stick to one story, or perhaps turned ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ into a slightly longer limited series to give all its characters the space they deserved, this could have been a far more impactful tale.
‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ is on Netflix.
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