Gulzar's Raavi Paar and Other Stories

A man gets thrown off a moving train by a man who is afraid that he will be killed by the other. A yesteryear starlet dies of heart attack after she realizes she mistakenly unburdened her heart to Property Broker. Last wish of a Muslim man to be burned after death leaves an entire qasbah in flames. A poor woman is at edge thinking Maharaj is after her izzat, Maharaj's old father does not figure in her worries till the end. A poor farmer thinks of saving land from Zamidars, he tries, but in the end gauges his courage, or lack of it, to be of a level somewhere in between that of Communists and Dacoits. A subject asks his writer what did all his well-written stories change when the subject still finds himself the same. A dead baby gets breastfed while a living one mistakenly gets thrown off a train and into a river. A man spends years observing night skies seeking the star of Galib's fate. Her son too is cruel to her, just like her husband and all the other men in her life. In a biographical story, a family mistakenly claims Gulzar as its own, a child they lost in Partition. A woman remembering her youth, its unhappy love story, treats her young daughter just the way her mother treated her, cruelly. Michelangelo finds face of Judas in old Jesus. Bimal Roy plans a movie on man's quest for Amrit, immortality and perhaps an undefinable more, dies of cancer after smoking his last cigarette. A man who braved people crying over his fate all the time commits suicide on the day of his marriage because he couldn't handle people laughing at him. A man meets a ghost who admires U.G. Krishnamurti. A woman's marriage turns out to be a process for acquiring cheap labour. A little girl's heart is broken by Dilip Kumar.  A midget adopts baby of a dead woman of 'dubious reputation'. A boy boards a train running away from his wrinkly old dadi only to realize how much he loved her. A woman leaves her husband and then learns to leave him. A village idiot is missed only after he is made to disappear. A pre-historic boy discovers fire and creates mythologies. A patriarchal tree and life around it gets destroyed during partition, and so it happens to a county and its way of life. A man is cruel to his childhood sweetheart. Animals finally wage a war against man, just when man wages a war to protect wildlife.

These in short are the sad tales from Gulzar's Raavi Paar and Other Stories.

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There was a time when I wanted to ask him, 'Why did you pick Sunil Shetty for that role?' I have given up on the question. I don't want a sad answer.

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