Last month I met a girl in my college who is a complete Tom Boy. She walks like boys, talks like boys, behaves like them as well. I know this might sound a little stereotypical, but that is how you generally judge a person. But I feel that somehow she is also the most beautiful girl on the campus. She is pretty and smart, which caught my attention. How has she grown to become such a tomboy if she is so beautiful? If I would have had her looks I would have been boasting them off somewhere.
I came across a very well written and a lesser known punjabi movie of Irrfan Khan, QISSA, a tale of a lonely ghost! A story that made me relate to the situation of the girl I talked about. Qissa is a story about a father who wants a boy to be a successor to be his family but does not. Even after 3 daughters, his last child also turns out to be a girl. Unable to digest this fact, the father fools himself into believing that the girl is actually a son. He treats her (I am going to refer to the girl treated son as ‘she’ and ‘her’) like a boy throughout his life. He scolds his daughters whenever she gets a scratch. When she gets her first period and tells her dad he tries to keep it a secret and never lets anyone knows. And as the time passes by, the father-daughter (or the father-son) relationship grows deep.
The girl dresses like men, talks like men, stays with men and even behaves like them. Still, there is a certain sense of beauty in her eyes and some naïve behaviour that tells us that she is a woman. When it is time for her marriage, her father starts looking for a girl, while, surprisingly she is interested in a girl too. She is married off happily and it is her wife that realises that the man she has been dreaming about is not someone she thought he is. (I always wanted to say such a dramatic Bollywood line)
Her man is not actually a man but a woman. Astonishingly, she handles it really well. She feels that it is for her husband to reveal her identity to the world and come out as a proud woman. But, when Irrfan Khan realizes about the fact that she has come to know about the truth he tries to rape brutally her, in order to get a son (a grandson perhaps) but is shot dead by his own child who he loved. Somewhere, given the situation, this bold step was the only right thing that could have been done in my view. The ghost of Irrfan Khan somehow starts haunting them and the whole society is demeaning the lesbian relationship. The monologue where the daughter is completely naked and talking to the ghost of her father might give some people chills.
It is an amazing piece of writing. Well, the story does not really have a ver well defined ending but I somehow feel that the director and the writers wanted to keep it subjective and open to interpretation. In my view though, the ghost of Irrfan Khan projected the society, who takes the face of his daughter in the end to symbolise the suffering she goes through but to completely understand this you have to go to watch this underrated, less talked about Irrfan Khan flick!