The film also taught me to simply swallow an ex’s love letter rather than have my present partner piece the fragments together. Later in Sangam, Kapoor’s affable and genial character would glower in the corner, suspicious of friend (Rajendra Kumar) and lover (Vyjayanthimala). In Andaz, I watched Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor complicate matters and friendship for beautiful Nargis. Look at the happy-go-lucky Raj Kapoor, now brooding, as friendship across class and background rears its ugly head in Awaara. I had fallen down the rabbit hole of Indian films, with all their baffling ideas of friendship and love. The rest is procreation and “Marriage toh maine society ke liye ki hai.” I learned about friendship, with Jai and Veeru’s ishq-e-haqiqi (true love), which was quite in line with my Pashtun sensibility and Plato/Aristotle philosophy that true love can only be between men.
On that Karachi weekend, I also learnt a lot about friendship, ideas that were reinforced when I watched the next film. But love, love toh darling tum se kiya hai.” My impressionable six-year-old self learned that romantic love, this heartstopping lakshman rekha-defying love, could exist beyond the cloistering walls of the home and hearth. At some stage in the film, the scoundrel pacifies a sulking glamorous creature who has just discovered he got married with the lines - “Marriage toh maine society ke liye ki hai. Of course, one friend had to marry a sanskari, the other a scoundrel. The movie was a tale of two young women, best friends to each other, living in houses with the same numbers, intent on playing matching-matching even when it came to getting married on the same date. My first Indian film is one that will forever remain a mystery, for none of us, not me, nor my aunts who had slipped the cassette into the machine ever registered its name. The Indian films I watched gave me my first life lessons on love, steered my life choices over the years and continue to influence what I consider a good love story. It did, however, become the first film I recounted for my audience. I wish I could say that Sholay was the first Indian film I watched. I quickly transformed into a dastango, memorising the films for their plots and dialogues that I could then narrate to cousins and friends. We watched Indian films on video cassettes, bought by people who actually went abroad - to Dubai, Hong Kong and such places. For small-town Pakistanis like me, summer breaks in Karachi was the closest it could get to going abroad, so we quickly lapped up this new development. In the early ’80s, Karachi had just discovered VCRs.
Jai and Veeru, the paragon of male friendship in Sholay Maine Pyar Kiya established that people of the opposite sex can never just be friends Amitabh Bachchan in Coolie Hrithik Roshan and Ameesha Patel in Kaho Na… Pyaar Hai went against family traditions.
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