The sudden screech of the brakes of a steam engine of a train ferrying refugees, the audacity of a young man to challenge the long deep groove that Cyril Radcliffe traced along a subcontinent – a line that decided the fate of millions by reducing them to their immediate religious identity – and the realisation that love can endure time and man-made boundaries, are not scenes that one usually sees these days in movies about India and Pakistan.Imtiaz Ali’s ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ is not special for telling us about the horrors of Partition – a fact well-documented in history books and grainy videos found in archives and subjects of PhD thesis.Its ingenuity lies in showing us that people living across the border are not much different from us – they speak the same language, share the same cultural history and live the same trauma from Partition – despite being slouched under the burden of the obligation to play the role of the hated enemy, the loathsome Pakistani, the villain of Dhurandhar-esque blockbusters.They look very much like us, bleed very much like us, the gashes across their chests mirror the wounds of a young Sikh man who lets out a guttural cry, as he pledges to come back in search of the Muslim woman he loves, a bond that doesn’t know borders, religion and the concept of Partition.In the time when mainstream Bollywood movies often blur the line between cinema and propaganda, glorify extra-judicial killings, lament the fact that pellet guns do “limited damage” and gleefully unite in singing the paeans of majoritarian politics, Main Vaapas Aaunga stands apart.As I watched Naseeruddin Shah’s character in the movie – desperate to return to his hometown Sargodha – incredulously tell a Border Security Force (BSF) officer that he’s also from “that other side of the border”, the one fact that sunk in was that our lived reality is just 78-year-old, not even qualifying as a footnote in the long history of the sub-continent.Artificial Intelligence is a much-recent phenomenon, mobiles and laptops weren’t known till the late 90s and Instagram reels fall brazenly inadequate in front of handwritten notes and memories which survived the bloodied birth pangs of two nations, remnants of which are still found in the delirium-induced last words of frail elderly men and women who know the cost of communal hate.At a time when religious minorities are routinely told to “go to Pakistan” and all Pakistanis are portrayed in Bollywood movies as Kalashnikov wielding, bloodthirsty fanatics, rueing demonetisation, plotting with pro-Khalistan elements and (least of all) Atiq Ahmed, the idea of a love story involving an Indian man and Pakistani woman lasting 78 years, does seem like an oddity.In Main Waapas Aaunga, Imtiaz Ali humanises those on the other side of the border, who, if the mainstream media and Bollywood are to be believed, have only one identity – Pakistani.But what happens when that very term sounds unfamiliar to a person whose existence predates the Partition?What do the proponents of war in both countries do, when all exhortations about how the people of the two countries are different, fall short before a dementia patient in his 90s, who doesn’t understand the language of hate and can only recall the love from his youth, which blossomed amidst the frescoed pillars of his college in pre-Partition Sargodha?Few years back, the photo of a protesting elderly Palestinian woman went viral on social media, wherein as an act of defiance against Israeli oppression, she held a poster which said “I’m older than your state.”With Main Vaapas Aaunga, Ali reminds us precisely this – a generation still lives among us which has seen a time when there weren’t two countries, but one.We’re shown Muslim families in Pakistan losing their sons while trying to protect their Hindu friends, a Sikh man wearing a skullcap to hide his turban and going to meet the Muslim woman he loves, and a shared sense of loss for a world which has become almost impossible to imagine from the pre-partition era – when a Kinnu and Jiya didn’t hesitate to express their love for each other, even as the world around them reinforced the exclusivity, which, almost eight decades after Partition, has pervaded every sphere of our lives.To see an India-Pakistan love story stretching from the 1940s to 2026, sans the anti-Pakistan hyperbole that most filmmakers use, is not a small feat in 21st century India.Instead of adopting an accusatory tone, Main Vaapas Aaunga balances the portrayal of love, with its depiction of violence, matter-of-factly, jarring, yet refusing to take sides.The film doesn’t hold back in one area – it never camouflages the ugliness of communalism.Without exaggeration, it reminds us that the religious hatred which is regularly stoked even today for electoral gains, has already destroyed millions of lives and families in 1947.And yet, we choose to forget.When police officers tell Muslim protesters in India to go to Pakistan, when calls for the boycott of Muslim businesses threaten to dismantle the livelihood of many, when punitive bulldozer demolitions reduce homes to rubble, and similarly, when beyond the concertina wire-bound border, atrocities against Hindus in Pakistan remain a continuing phenomenon, we forget that an entire generation in the subcontinent had already lost their homes to communal violence, wounds which are still raw and festering, even after the passing of seven decades, and still, fresh wounds are being created everyday.And yet, the reaction to Main Vapas Aunga has shown that there’s hope.The sight of the younger generation – including many from the Gen Z demographic – accompanying their grandfathers and grandmothers to watch the movie or sharing stories they heard from their previous generations with Ali during his interactions with the audience in different cities, presents a welcome change from the normalisation of hate-filled slogans in cinema halls.It gives hope that this cycle of dehumanisation may not be permanent, much as the following line from a song from the movie which reminds us that we’re all humans at the end:“Haath jo utha, gardanein jo kati – wo bhi main, wo bhi tu, aadmi (The hand that was raised, the necks that were severed – that too was I, that too was you; human).”