In Rocket Boys, both Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Bhabha find love, but seek purpose

In the seventh episode of Rocket Boys, Homi Bhabha [Jim Sarbh] arrives at the wedding of Pipsi, a woman he has romantically courted in the past. “Usse kabhi bataya kyun nahi?” [why did you never tell her?], a friend asks out of somewhat pitying concern, to which Bhabha responds “There was always enough to make me keep coming back to her. Not quite enough to make her stay."

It is an elegiac moment set amidst the birth of a new chapter — a dawn for someone, as night swoons over the flame of the day. None of this is, however, painted as a violent tragedy, the brutal erasure of a once-promising romance.

There is perhaps no better example of cinema and storytelling’s power of rewriting than Rocket Boys’ portrayal of two love stories set in the '50s-60s, that also seem untarnished by the years of cinema that has served as the interlude up until the present day. For in Rocket Boys, both Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Bhabha find love, but seek purpose. 

Rocket Boys has been rightfully praised for its incredible restraint in portraying a story that could so easily have beaten its chest to the chorus of patriotic numbers. It is instead a story that neither hastes its exhibition of excellence, nor is overawed by the minds it wants to champion. It is obviously a portrayal of elite characters in an impoverished India, but it is never not self-aware of the handicaps these people carry at the back of their minds.

Sarabhai [played by the charming Ishwak Singh] discovers Mrinalini, a Bharatnatyam dancer [Regina Cassandra]. It is love at first sight, as it so often is in our cinema, and thus carries with it an innate sense to satisfy the audience’s thirst for the cinematic. There is then the underdog hesitance, the awkward first conversation, the naïve but ultimately audacious proposal. But none of this is cushioned by the invisibility of the future. Vikram and Mrinalini learn that marriage is more than just romantic overtures. It is also learning, growth, and sustenance as individuals, often at each other’s expense. It is near radical that Rocket Boys embraces this quiet conflict that almost secretly tears through the fabric of a respectful marriage. Vikram and Mrinalini drift apart, without ever really acknowledging that they have drifted apart. Love, the show tells us, is an everyday pursuit like any other, an exercise in commitment rather than the plateauing of its accepted stakes. It takes doing or else it becomes an island of memory you revisit as a tourist for both escape and reassurance.

In contrast, Bhabha’s near-glamorous careerism obviates the need for purpose, more than the need for a self-satisfying precipice to view the world from. Pipsi [played by the lovely Saba Azad] is a constant presence through Bhabha’s highs and lows but she stops short of becoming his emotional, familial reckoning. There is an unsaid quality to the conflict that gestates in both stories, that though about love in a sense, are really about discovering the formative self. Insofar as they are stories about individuals who view relationships not through the prism of societal contracts but through the lens of individuality’s perseverance over it.

Fidelity, in a sense, commands a price but what if the part of us that we must transact with is the one that we cannot live without. It is a form of self-awareness that can neither be predicted nor anticipated. It is a fact that the show acknowledges. And that, perhaps in essence, is the blinding effect of love, the fact that it reveals as much about the other as it conceals about yourself. Rocket Boys, in the most delicate, anti-Bollywood of ways [twice over] explores this aspect of romance that also rather incredibly feels decades ahead in what is technically a rearview mirror. So much so that I have resisted the urge to try and confirm if these stories are inspired by facts or whether they are completely fictionalised, for they affect so fully and intimately. 

None of this is to say that a show about two brilliant men portrays love as the burden the genius must bear with. It is simply the humanising quality of the heart’s many missteps that even the most clear-eyed men come across as conflicted simpletons when braced with a problem no formula, no form of arithmetic can solve. These men simply hunger for immeasurable height, that the imprecise depths of love cannot fill.

It is perhaps a first in Indian cinema that two messianic heroes who accomplish the unlikely also somewhat underwhelm on a front that this very industry has taught us is the final frontier of self-worth – reciprocal love. Both Vikram and Homi belong to a pursuit they cannot possess, and possess something they struggle to belong to.

The show, however, does not cast them as tragic, indecisive men marooned on the shores of uncertainty and self-doubt but men who believe there is just as much meaning in trying to invent the obscure as there is in self-identifying with the invisible. Or as Mrinalini says to Homi at Pipsi’s wedding, "Well, I guess the poets aren’t right after all. It’s not all about love."

Rocket Boys is streaming on SonyLIV.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.