There exists an old proverb ‘Time and tide wait for none’. I was wondering whether this should be the first of the many sticky notes that Shakun Batra and his team of screenwriters stuck in their writing room wall while starting off with #Gehraiyaan. The reason I felt so is that time is the omnipresent centrepiece of the tale and we get literal intercuts of waves crashing on very often. We have a lot of sea in the film and the film’s apt title also translates to ‘depths’. The way the characters in the film were explored felt like they were far above their own depths, much like the yacht floating on the sea. Also, every single human heart encompasses a sea inside of it – a sea so deep that time (like the tide) brings out both precious and ugly treasures to the surface (or the shore).
As social animals, we chance upon and interact with fellow animals at a designated point in the time-space continuum. Simply put, people happen at that time they’re supposed to happen – neither early nor late. But the way the interactions and conflicts with them happens depends on numerous factors – the most important of them is the baggage we carry. This baggage can either be from the past or something that’s getting piled upon at the present. Either way, it’s almost inevitable of its influence. The only way these interactions could have been any different is maybe if we had a portal to an alternate parallel universe, but sadly it is all in the fictional imagination.
The residues from the past make us who we are in the present and this forms the crux of the film. Though this isn’t something unexplored in cinema, the intriguing way it was written and presented through the different characters made all the difference. I loved the parallels drawn across generations of people and how the ‘residue’ connects the children and their parents. Alisha faces the same thing from Zain what her father faced from her mother. Zain does the same thing he did to his mother to the two women – Tia and Alisha. Tia undergoes the same pain as her mother. Alisha does the same thing to Tia what her mother did to her father. The writing just blew me away upon retrospecting the above things, which weren’t just witty, but gave a sense of circle to the life of these characters. These weren’t just grey characters, but ones switching across the spectrum to blacks and whites and in the process of doing so create ripples or more of a domino effect on each other.
It also made me question myself is destiny that inevitable? Are the lives of us children so much in the hands of chance? Much like the game of snake and ladder we see earlier in the film. All of this happens amidst the ticking bomb called ‘time’ cruelly passing by, not waiting even a bit. The film maybe wants to advocate the fact that all we can do is to forgive our past selves, give a second chance to ourselves in the present and then prepare the future self to do the same to the present version; in short, come to terms with the surprise packages that time brings with it.
