Many Indians would testify that after a certain age –particularly post retirement—the chief mode of communication between a long-married couple is bickering. Over the years, they have already spoken about things that matter, but for a nice verbal spat, new inputs can always be found. That does not necessarily mean they are unhappy, it’s just that they are all talked out.
This idea forms the basis of Seemaa Desai’s charming family drama, Kaushaljis vs Kaushal. Yug (Pavail Gulatie) and his sister Reet (Deeksha Joshi) have moved out of their parents’ home in Kannauj to pursue their careers. He works with a Noida-based marketing agency, she works with a rural NGO. Left alone in a large mansion, Sahil Kaushal (Ashutosh Rana) and his wife Sangeeta (Sheeba Chaddha), unable to follow their passions – his for qawwali, hers for ittar (the UP town is famous for perfume—take out their bitterness on each other by squabbling, instead of having normal conversations.
When Yug meets Kiara (Ishita Talwar), a New York import from a broken family, and she says that she would like to marry into a“kushal mangal” kind of family, he does not know how to deal with the situation. He has told his parents that the new generation does not stew over uncontrollable circumstances, they simply move on, and is then shocked to discover that his parents are ready to divorce each other after 26 years of marriage.
He and Reet try their hardest to dissuade the parents, but the divorce papers are filed, and the Kaushal couple is given the mandatory waiting period to either reconcile or finally dissolve their marriage.
In Hindi films, if not so much in contemporary society, divorce is still an ugly word, so the film is not quite willing to accept that in a small town with everybody free to interfere and disapprove, the divorce will actually go through, but it is still interesting to watch how the situation will be resolved. The film at least throws up the possibility that a marriage that has survived for 26 years, has not necessarily been a compatible one. The ‘Boomer’ generation stuck with or ‘nibhao-ed’ a marriage, because of the fear of what people will say. It is also equally true that an incompatible marriage could also be a stable one, if the couple is mature enough to work around their differences. The film does not consider what might actually happen if a couple in their fifties, with children of marriageable age, got divorced by mutual consent, but at least one foot stepped out of the ‘Laxmanrekha’ of holy matrimony.
Kaushaljs vs Kaushal is an easy watch, and also, in some ways, also a thought-provoking one. The performances of the older couple grease the wheels of this film – both Sheeba Chaddha and Ashutosh Rana are brilliant and make their characters endearing. Pavail Gulatie and Isha Talwar bask in their glow.
