But film endings cannot be taken at face value any more than dreams can be understood by taking their fantastical images literally. Their meanings lie in how we experience them and what they unlock in us. After all, film-collectives often elide caste and gender to glorify a central masculine, upper-caste figure. And in Naya Daur co-operation defeats competition in, well, a competitive race between a tanga and a bus. The collective triumphs, but Ajit’s romantic disappointment remains unacknowledged.  

The violent impact of collective thinking on individual desire suffuses another iconic Dilip Kumar film—Andaaz. A love triangle which hinges on how a woman’s ‘andaz’—is always open to interpretation by the world. Eventually the suspicions and interpretations of men (Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Sapru) dictate the meaning of reality, rather than the feelings of this woman (Nargis), with tragic consequences. The film ends on a submissive note, but the run-time is so strongly rooted in Nargis’s subjectivity, that its meaning can hardly be fixed by the ending.

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Viewed as a collective, films offer us a range of meanings to traverse as we make sense of our lives. To be stuck in one meaning is the definition of loneliness. To exist in multiple overlapping meanings of ourselves, is one way the dream of co-existence can include ever-multiplying realities and a glimpse of freedom. The conservative troll and the woke critic both insist that only the literal is meaningful and dogma determines meaning—that public and private must conform instead of overlap—eroding the space to express and resolve messy emotions and realities.

Perhaps these thoughts of fertile double meanings—an actor who spoke as if in private dialogue on a public screen, of an audience fantasising individually in a theatre alongside others, of untidy selves permitted representation, drifted like clouds through my mind when Dilip Kumar died, and it reminded me why our times are sometimes a little too lonely, that’s all.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com