Abhiman

In this vast sea of human interactions, upon whose surface emotions, both tragic and comic, poignant and trivial, ebb and flow, gather momentum and break, and mix in a turbulent confusion, every so often there comes along a little line, a piece of poetry, a thought at once both supremely elegant and precisely striking, even to the point of being heartbreaking, and it extracts from the chaos of reality in which love melts into hatred and the boundaries of emotion and intention are vague, a unification, an understanding, a concept which shines clear like a bush backgrounded by mist, an idea which hangs delicately in space, constant, unswerving, like a hesitant melodious violin whose sounds seems to be coming from afar, crisp within the tumult of the violas and the piano.

In the movie Raincoat, Shubha Mudgal pines 'Piya tora kaisa abhiman (My lover, why do have this pride),' and it's one of those beautiful moments when a part of this arbitrary reality has been shocked into submissiveness and it presents itself melted along the beautiful contours of the artist's sensitivity. Just a few words, and one feels the infinite desperation of the lover with a poignancy which would only have been reduced, had an effort been made to explain it away. She sits there waiting for him and he doesn't arrive. And as time slips through her fingers like heartless grains of sand, she can only wonder, in mute resignation, what pride prevents him from coming to her. His actions are incomprehensible to her and yet, as the lines almost give away, she is trying hard to understand and would do all that is within her means and more, if only he came back and talked with her. But he doesn't come and she can only wonder...

This reminds me of another beautiful line from Ghulam Ali's 'Chupke Chupe raat din which goes,

Berukhi ke saath sun-na darde dil ki daastan

Wo kalaai mein tera kangan ghumana yaad hai

(I remember how you were fiddling with your bangles, when I was trying to tell you the story of my heartbreak)