Director: Vijay Raaz

Actors: Vijay Raaz, Manu Rishi

Years ago, I watched a film called Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) — a charming little WW-1 (true) story about how a team of soldiers from the warring German, French and Scottish battalions end up fraternising in No Man’s Land on Christmas Eve. Long after, that snowy winter night has stayed with me; it remained rooted in brutal and depressing reality despite occasional whiffs of longing and companionship.

Kya Dilli Kya Lahore, a directorial debut by (actor) Vijay Raaz, brings to fore the same emotions with minimum fuss. Again, the protagonists are puppets, two unlikely survivors of a NorthWest Frontier crossfire in 1948, when the wounds on both sides are still fresh. Manu Rishi is the reluctant Indian cook originally from Lahore, trapped and petrified in a cabin, after his team is slaughtered. You aren’t alone, your country is with you—he is told by a cackling radio voice.
Vijay Raaz is the lone Pakistani soldier, originally from Delhi, scheming to procure top-secret Indian documents from the shack.

Remarkably, their blindfolded verbal volleys, ripe with nervous energy, form the first 45 minutes. They’re hurting and confused, and the actors make you forget about the larger picture. You know exactly how it’s going to end, you know this is technically a partition story set within the simplistic confines of a low-budget (anti) war drama. Yet, it is riveting to witness their body language, their lapse in ideologies when facing wrong end of a smoking Rifle. These are two artists at the top of their game, engaging us in a battle that is not theirs to fight.

Ali’s (Raaz) patriotism, still in an embryonic stage, is not defined by feelings of loss and separation yet. He is vulnerable, and his angst is defined by strict orders from the top. His voice, aided so well by some very evocative sound design, radiates pride for a nation. But which one?
Shastri (Rishi), in Gandhi glasses, briefly entertains the randomness of violence, but cannot stop being human. Your father needs you more than the border does— he eventually advises Ali, hoping to believe his own words. As they begin to exchange stories and ill-timed anecdotes in the most bizarre of settings, it’s hard not to sympathise with their situations. All the brain-washing and nationalistic hard-wiring slowly melts away when they find themselves crawling and ducking in a shack immortalised between life and death.
Raj Zutshi and Vishwajeet Pradhan are lazy but necessary plot devices to bring across a universal message of humanity in a film that shouldn’t have been structured around an interval or jarring background score.

It must have been tempting to make this a comedy, given the famous timing of the actors at hand. But Gulzar saab, the presenter of this film, puts things into perspective with a single verse. He renders every manipulative war drama ever made inconsequential, with words that reduce borders to mere lines stretched in anger. Let the lines be.
Let their flaws be.