Music As A Portal

While his early films — Socha Na Tha, Jab We Met — were fairly straightforward, narratively speaking, it is in Love Aaj Kal, and most potently in Rockstar that Ali uses ruptured time dizzyingly. It begins with Jordan (Ranbir Kapoor) getting into a fist fight in Verona, and then running away from the brawl, boarding a bus, and entering a sold out concert — his sold out concert. He walks with a stride that is both arrogant and deserved. As he approaches the mic and strums the guitar, the film collapses into his past: Janardhan Jakhar singing the same song, in the same voice, but in front of Lado Sarai bus station, clad in his Delhi winter sweater vest. The song cartwheels through his journey, singing at clubs, concerts, and at a dargah. His facial scruff and the length of his hair signify a journey that the film will now take us through, haphazardly, but with full force.

Why do we slip across time in this movie? This is why character “progressions” — Janardhan to Jordan in Rockstar; Ved to Don in Tamasha; Chamkila the wimp to Chamkila the beedi-sparker — happen as trips in the narrative, in the gaps between the repetitions. If we keep seeing Jordan in Janardhan, the same Mohit Chauhan voice buoying you from past to present to past, for example, his becoming Jordan is of no importance, the journey from the latter to the former becomes weak, whispering, when you keep switching between them.

Janardhan meets Heer (Nargis Fakhri), the unattainable belle of the ball. Their friendship finds him a ticket to Kashmir to be at her wedding to another man who is her equal and socially superior to Janardhan. It is here that Janardhan and Heer fall in love, a flicker that roars into a fire over the film. After Heer’s wedding, through the song ‘Phir Se Ud Chala’, we are stumbled forward again into his journey as Ali shows his hero as an artist, a popular renegade icon, a public figure whom a journalist tries to track down his story so that the story can loop back to fill the gap between him leaving Heer’s wedding and his success—his becoming.

The journey, like that of Ved’s success as a thespian in Tamasha, is actually quite predictable. He is talented. He becomes famous. Ali is uninterested in the laboor and the abrasive frustration of the journey itself. He would rather stew in the emotional turmoil of Jordan and the naivete of Janardhan as two estranged poles of being.

It is through Rahman’s music that Ali and Bajaj further tangle time. In Rockstar, we are told of a big fight that happens at Janardhan’s home that leaves him homeless and abandoned. Then we are immediately shown an image of him two months later, ragged, emaciated, unkempt under the house of a well wisher, asking for succor. What happened in between?

Kun faya kun; Be and it is.

Music, then, becomes the space where we experience the past as present, and the present as past in this disorienting, greased slippage of time.

If linearity were the organizing principle, after his removal from his house, we would have ‘Kun Faya Kun’, and then, his shaggy face, yearning for a warm meal under a stable roof. By collapsing the distance between past and present, here and there, again and again, the pull of the question of how one gets from past to present, here to there is not as strong, as demanding. The decision to move back and forth is aided by not just music, but multiple narrators, each articulating their slice of his story. Not just time, but place, too becomes a narrative formality — now in Prague, then Dharamshala, then Delhi, then Bombay.

Dame Judi Dench and Ali Fazal | Victoria & Abdul

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