In an otherwise uneven retelling of familiar longing in Love Aaj Kal (2020), there is a moment tucked away at the very end, after the story has exhausted itself, even after the credits have rolled, that stays longer than anything that precedes it. Kartik Aaryan stands beneath the balcony of the woman he loves, looking up with the hope that generations of lovers before him have carried. But the balcony offers no answer. No silhouette appears or hand parts the curtains. There is only and only absence. It is here it strikes you that after returning time and again to the tales of Romeo and Juliet, Heer Ranjha and Laila Majnu, stories that, in many ways, are variations of the same wound (much like most Imtiaz Ali’s films), this time, however, Ali finds a new note to play. Romeo is still standing beneath Juliet’s balcony. But this time, Juliet is gone and Romeo is to blame. He only claimed to love but never dared to truly love.It is this thought, this moment, that returns to your mind in the latter half of Main Vaapas Aaunga. After years of separation and promises stretched across borders and time, a young Keenu (Vedang Raina), returns to Pakistan hoping to reunite with the woman he once loved. The emotional architecture of the scene lies in how it is staged. Keenu waits for her to come down. He has crossed distances, carried memories, and arrived at the doorstep of a possibility. However, at the crucial moment, his anger arrives before his love can. And so he turns away. What follows unfolds almost like a cruel correction of timing. Romeo staring at Juliet’s balcony, but this time, she’s no longer there.As Keenu leaves the frame, the camera pulls back into a wide shot. And there, descending the staircase with urgency and hope, is Afsana (Sharvari). She is running towards the reunion he has already abandoned. By the time she reaches the bottom, he is gone. The film leaves her standing alone on those stairs, captured from a distance, diminished by the frame but somehow made larger by it. It is a remarkably restrained image. The camera refuses to move closer, but the moment itself does. For here, she becomes Ali’s Juliet, abandoned by a Romeo who promised more than he was capable of giving. It is only poetic justice, then, that Keenu spends the rest of his life paying for that one moment.Also Read | Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga chronicles a country in danger of forgetting itselfWhen we meet him on his deathbed (Naseeruddin Shah), all we see is yearning. He pines, cries, calls out into the void. You cannot help but wonder: how many times did he revisit that day in his mind? How many times did he imagine staying for a few seconds longer? How many times did he wake up in the middle of the night, haunted not by what fate had done to him, but by what he had done to himself? Some mistakes break your heart once. Others break it every day for the rest of your life. When his son says that he spent much of his life consumed by hatred, the line acquires an altogether different meaning. Because what if the hatred was never really for anyone else? What if, beneath all the bitterness, was a man who could never forgive himself? A man who had spent decades carrying the knowledge that the greatest loss of his life was not taken from him, it was, in fact, abandoned by him. Keenu yearns for Afsana on his deathbed.His punishment is not death. It is the far crueler sentence of having to live. It is him who remains stranded in that corridor of time. Spiritually, he never left that house. And perhaps that is the saddest thing about him. Not that he spent a lifetime searching for Afsana, but that he spent a lifetime searching for the man who deserved her. And yet, Ali grants Keenu a measure of redemption in the film’s closing moments. As death draws near, Keenu imagines Afsana before him. For the first time, he says everything he should have said long ago. He reads to her the poem he had carried within him for years. And then comes the film’s most heartbreaking gesture. This time, he does not leave in anger. This time, he asks for her permission.That is what makes the climax so devastatingly effective. The film, which spends most of its runtime yearning for reunion and embrace, ultimately finds its deepest truth in the act of letting go. But Ali leaves us with one final cruelty. Even in death, Keenu cannot have Afsana. All he is granted is the memory of her, the imagination of her, the version of her that survives within his longing. Such is the cost of the choice he made all those years ago. But what is even crueler, more tragic, more heartbreaking, is to imagine Afsana’s fate. For all its empathy towards her, the film never truly allows us inside her loneliness. We see her largely through Keenu’s eyes, through his memories, his regrets. Yet once the film plants that image of her standing alone on those stairs, the mind refuses to let her go. You cannot help but wonder: did she ever truly leave those stairs? Did a part of her remain there too, waiting for a man who had already chosen to walk away?Story continues below this adIn its closing moments, the film tells us that Afsana died long before Keenu, and that she pined for him deeply in her final years. The revelation lands like a fresh wound. For even after being abandoned, even after a lifetime of absence, she remained his Juliet. She carried his memory not as resentment, but as remembrance. And it is here that the tragedy of their tale reveals itself in full. Keenu spends his life haunted by a mistake. Afsana spends hers haunted by a promise. All that remains for her are the words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz: “Phir koi aaya dil-e-zar nahin koi nahin, rah-rau hoga kahin aur chala jaega.”