By Rohan Murti

We yell at her in disgust when she asks us to pack our school-bag, we retort in discomfort every time she wakes us up in the morning and we throw a fit whenever our demands aren’t catered to. A neatly packed lunch box carries each day’s aromatic love and the crisply ironed white shirt wears the school badge with pride. School life, although just the beginning, forms the essence of the mother-son relationship.

Dheeraj Jindal’s ‘The School Bag’ is reminiscent of those school-days, and takes us through a saddening emotional upheaval with its events.

Rasika Dugal plays an affectionate mother who lives with her son in Peshawar, Pakistan. The ability to emote so well — be it the radiant chuckles while playing with her kid or longing for her husband who serves in the Army — seems to be Dugal’s trump card. Visually depicting an intimate relationship on screen, and attuning the viewer’s mind to any particular emotion has never been easy. How Dheeraj Jindal does this effortlessly and that too, in such a succinct time period, might as well be attributed to the amount of screen time he has allotted for allowing this relationship to get firmly established. There is no hurry to move on; so much of the “plot” is their chemistry.

An unexpected by-product of the film is the way it fondles the idea of glancing at our long-time neighbour in an entirely different fashion. A mother’s benevolence knows no boundaries, be it an Urdu-speaking Pakistani woman waiting to surprise her son on his birthday or her equally affectionate Indian counterpart. As and when we see ourselves unknowingly become a part of this simple mother-son bonhomie, the perception of an envisioned Pakistan changes — which is probably the best way this film could affect a viewer.

‘The School Bag’ ends on a sombre note, as a crackling voice on the radio announces the brutal killing of 100 children in a terrorist attack in Army Public School, Peshawar. The film rides high on emotion and condemns terrorism in its own unique manner. As the ending unravels, we can feel ourselves seething in rage, as we steadily accept the fact that every country today is plagued by the menace of terrorism.