GHAJINI, DHOBI GHAT & TALAASH… the ‘memory’ trilogy

It is a stunning achievement and one that is almost missed; but with Ghajini, Dhobi Ghat and now Talaash, Aamir Khan has invested with ‘memory’, both personal and political, in three vastly different genre films that are nevertheless connected by a common ‘quest’. The ‘talaash’ at the heart of his most recent film is that of a cop (a symbol of the system that has failed to ‘look out’ for those for whom it was precisely created) for the class of people that have fallen through the cracks. In Dhobi Ghat, it was an artist made privy to a migrant woman by way of her video-logs. And in Ghajini, it was an entrepreneur having to remap his memory which had stopped making new ones from the precise point where his ‘connect’ to a ‘class’ other than his was violently taken away from him.

That the cop Surjan Singh is an outsider to Mumbai is just as important to the plot of Talaash as Abhishek Bachchan’s being a Kannadiga cop Kamath was to the spectral world of Dum Maaro Dum whose Goan mystery was unraveled across the border in Karnataka. This is just one of the similarities between Reema Kagti’s unrelentingly dark film and Rohan Sippy’s superlative brooding masterpiece from 2011. Both films have cops with deep personal losses investigating a case that involves unearthing the ‘undead’.

Coming back to Aamir Khan’s trilogy, and Talaash in particular, it is very important to observe that the confrontation of ‘memory’ in each of these films happens to a character representing a ‘class’ of society that most needs to be reminded and made aware of a history; and correct it, protect it, if not avenge it- the cop in Talaash, the painter in Dhobi Ghat and the high-flier in Ghajini.

It would be erroneous to think of Talaash as merely a suspense thriller. That ‘quest’ in fact is a red herring. To the faceless-nameless of Mumbai’s underbelly captured perfectly in the opening credits (“Jo rooh pyaasi hai, jinmein udaasi hai, woh hai ghoomti”), it is imperative that Aamir’s cop ‘uncover’ their existence. The reality is not ‘Rosy’, and it is precisely such an ‘outsider’ with a personal loss of his own that Rosy was waiting for to acknowledge the lives that are never accounted for (“Jo ginti mein nahin aate, woh gayab kaise ho sakte hain”). Like the artist in Dhobi Ghat acknowledged the ‘existence’ of the other, and the protagonist in Ghajini had himself tattooed all over body denying the copout to forget.

It is also interesting to note that in all the three films, there is also a certain gender play. In all the three films, the ‘memory’ to be preserved is that of a woman ‘past’, while the protagonist struggles with the presence of a tangible woman in the ‘now’.

A haunting film with superlative performances (Aamir and Rani underplay to pith-perfection, Nawazudding shines in a cameo and Kareena gives her finest performance in the last few years), Talaash is a film that will only get richer on repeated viewings… and won’t let you forget it quite so easily.

– Abhishek Bandekar