Pakeezah (1972), Meena Kumari and Trains

Meena Kumari's character Sahibjaan in Pakeezah has an obsession with trains, just like me. Although the root cause of our obsessions are vastly different. She almost met (she was sleeping, so she didn't get a chance to meet in the conventional sense) a handsome stranger on an overnight train journey, who left a note of appreciation about her soft feet in Urdu. Even expletives sound like poems in Urdu, so can't blame the lady if she fell head over heels reading a poetic note about her heels. 

Ethereal Meena Kumari, staring out of the window of the train, right after she has read the mysterious note

My fascination with trains could've started in my childhood filled with multi-day, overnight train journeys that took our family to places known & cherished or unknown & magical. If you lived in India in the 20th century and loved/had to travel, there was no escaping the trains. That was probably why  connecting the story-dots in director Kamal Amrohi's story is the omnipresent Indian Railways.

Pakeezah, Meena Kumari's magnum opus created for her by her husband (later ex) Kamal Amrohi is a grand visual poem which took almost fifteen years in the making. The majority of the work happening during the years 1964 to 1971 and the movie was released a couple of months before Meena Kumari's death at 38 in March 1972.

Meena Kumari designed all her wonderfully pirouette-able and elegantly colorful dance costumes for the movie. The music and the songs which can single-handedly make or break a Bollywood musical was composed by Ghulam Muhammad and the lyrics were penned by some of the best Urdu poets of the era like Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kamal Amrohi and Kaifi Bhopali. The cinematography and the production design must have cost a pretty penny.

It is a Muslim-social about a tawaif (a Muslim courtesan or dancing girl) who falls in love with a gentleman in a history-repeats type of situation where the same kind of doomed love affair happens to a mother and her daughter, with two different gentlemen, of course. Both the mother and the daughter are played by Meena Kumari, but there in no need for these characters to share screen time as mother dies after childbirth and the daughter is only shown after she is in her late teens as she takes on the role of the dancer-courtesan. Ashok Kumar plays the love interest in the first affair and Raj Kumar's impeccable Hindustani diction won him the role of the younger Meena Kumari's lover.

The tumultuous life of Meena Kumari, the actor, is evident on her face that ages a decade during the making and completion of the movie. Meena Kumari, while she does not look like she is 17, is convincingly young as the younger (daughter) courtesan when the film starts out. But the film which seems to have been shot chronologically shows a beaten, puffy actor ravaged by depression and ill-health, as it progresses past the half way mark.

The lovers - Raj Kumar and Meena Kumari, accidentally meet again, during a train journey towards the end of the movie

Pakeezah is a window into a bygone era and world where tawaifs and nawabs used to exist along with teak-paneled Indian railway coaches and horse-drawn tangas. Much of the actions of the characters cannot be explained or justified in the current context nor is the century old societal framework comprehensible while I am typing and gazing at the neighbor's Tesla parked on their driveway. It is a splendid period piece, elegantly crafted, a fitting final tribute to one of the greatest actors of Indian cinema - Meena Kumari, and totally woman-'owned'.