She doesn’t know why she does what she does. Kaira isn’t perfect, and the film doesn’t justify her behaviour or actions. So it’s heartening and refreshing to know that a mainstream film like Dear Zindagi, starring two Bollywood stars, Khan and Bhatt, chooses to talk about mental health, and does so in a manner that doesn’t trivialise its finer details. So even though you’re with people, you’re alone-and despite having a good time, you don’t feel safe, feel left out, as if something’s missing. Modern Indian society-with its propensity for drunken conversations, superficial humour, smart repartee, a sense of irony and detachment-prizes perfection, emotional numbness, and looks down upon vulnerability. There’s a reason we don’t talk about mental health, because we don’t like to talk about ourselves, our inner fears and desires, for we like to be accepted and liked and loved. “I don’t go to a therapist so that I can tell others that I’m gay,” her friend says. There’s no judgment in her tone or demenaour. Earlier in the film, Kaira asks her friend about his DD (“ Dil ka Doctor”), therapist: “Why do you see one? So that you can tell others that you’re gay?” Kaira and her friend are at a shooting location, and she’s taking a break. Directed by Gauri Shinde, Dear Zindagi is about these small moments, the ones we usually don’t share with others, which shame and guilt-trip us, which make us less perfect, make us less… normal. Jehangir Khan (Shahrukh Khan), and talking about her own childhood, opening the cellar in her heart no one else’s been privy to: the shame and guilt of abandonment, of rejection, of not feeling loved. At one point in the movie, Kaira (Alia Bhatt), an up-and-coming cinematographer, is sitting opposite her therapist, Dr. I didn’t expect to revisit that feeling at all, much less while watching a film. But when that moment receded, I felt relieved and calm, as if a part of me had just been set free, had just been accepted.
I was very embarrassed, and very surprised, because I was talking about something that had happened one and a half decade ago, but the pain, even after such a long time, felt real and new and physical, stinging deep and not stopping. Those tears were hard and uncontrollable, as if they had lives of their own-some formed a film over my eyes, some fell on my shirt, some hung on my cheeks, some trailed down.
“Yeah, I did not,” I said, and started crying-first slowly, and then in spurts.
It was an innocuous question, really, which just sat there, not asked with an intention to elicit a reaction. “You didn’t take tiffin to school after eight grade?” She asked, as a matter of fact. But, more importantly, I was tired of being tired. It was a regular March afternoon this year, and I was sitting opposite my therapist, whom I had started seeing recently, because I was tired of my own emotional vacuum, one I had been carrying and hiding for years. “You know, I haven’t really cared for breakfast in a long, long time, because I stopped taking tiffin to school after eight grade.” A still from Dear Zindagi featuring actors Alia Bhatt and Shah Rukh Khan.
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