I was recently (re)watching Luck By Chance and noticed details in it that I hadn’t before. This includes the nuances in the intimate terrace scene where the two protagonists take their relationship a step forward. It was touching to see them lying together against the glorious Mumbai dawn, possibly before a day that would test their commitment to their vocation once again.
While watching it, I had another realisation. That Konkona Sen Sharma has some of the most outstanding terrace scenes among all Hindi movie actors. Here, we remember them in detail.
“Ab tumhari servicing ho gayi hai” – Life in a…Metro.
There are days when you wake up and realise, all over again, that Irrfan is not among us, and the heaviness of that thought is still as fresh and excruciating as it was the day he passed away. Some wounds heal but they never stop hurting because the damage is so deep. Thankfully, we have a lot to go back to when we miss Irrfan. I go back to this scene very often. I loved him with Konkona in Life in a…Metro. It was the coming together of two very different characters. One coy and reserved. The other, overconfident and outspoken.
However, they fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and this scene depicts that amazingly well. When Shruti (played by Konkona) finds everything way too much to deal with, Monty (played by Irrfan) takes her to the terrace and asks her to scream. She hesitates at first but then, gives in. She is taken aback by her own meltdown and that is when Monty holds her and cheekily says, “Ab tumhari servicing ho gayi hai“.
It is one of those scenes which makes every person feel like it was written for them. Who among us doesn’t want to scream?!
“Tum, main aur do cup chai” – Wake Up Sid.
After celebrating her birthday with two cups of tea and a bread-jam cake, Sid and Ayesha go and sit on the terrace. They eventually start discussing why there was no romance between them and Ayesha’s answer sets the foundation for the better part of the movie. She just wants to be friends with Sid because he is a “boy” and she likes to date “men”, who are ambitious. Just like her.
What Ayesha really wanted to see in her partner was passion, before ambition, she just didn’t know it at that point in time. I feel drawn towards such characters, who don’t know everything about themselves. There is warm modesty in it.
“Usmein woh aag nahin hai”- Luck By Chance.
I always feel like if Sona and Ayesha were to meet each other, they’d become good friends. They would have had so much to talk about, given their personalities and experiences. This scene from Luck By Chance is also interesting because Sona is with the kind of guy Ayesha wishes to date – passionate and ambitious. But Sona does not end up with Vikram while Ayesha falls in love with Sid.
I have an obsession with associating stories, don’t mind me.
Apart from the evident romance (or lack of it), these scenes are a window into the women’s personalities. Sona believes in luck, so much, she’d wish on someone else’s eyelash. It gives her comfort to think there are forces beyond what people can see. In the end, the eyelash proves to be loyal to its owner, though. Maybe there are forces beyond what people can see.
“Naya ashiqui hai…whiskey ke saath” – Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare.
Director Alankrita Shrivastava’s Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare was an unusually delightful movie about an accounting firm employee (played by Konkona) and her cousin (played by Bhumi Pednekar) who comes to live with her. Things do not go well between them because the said cousin has her own plans to live her life and they do not align with Radha’s idea of decency.
In this terrace scene, they make up. The two women realise they have more in common than they thought. There’s anger all women share, this is anger against the world which makes them do things they do not want to do. But by the time we realise we’re angry, most of us are too deeply stuck in the system to get out of it. Some of us manage to do that, in our own ways, some of us don’t. But whatever the result is, this journey towards our imagined freedom is impossible without the help of other women in our lives. They can be cousins, friends, neighbours, or a shopkeeper we don’t know the name of. Anyone.
There are stars in the sky, Konkona is one under it.