Movie Rewind | October: Varun Dhawan and Banita Sandhu's aching romance where love drifts like fallen flowers

Where is Dan?

It’s a straightforward question. Banita Sandhu’s Shiuli is sitting on a high roof with the rest of the hotel staff.

In the brief moments we know Shiuli as a conscious, breathing presence, she appears reserved and deeply committed to her work, yet curious about Varun Dhawan’s impulsive, childish Dan, who believes he deserves better than a job in the hospitality industry.

The curiosity lingers in fleeting glances as she watches him cut corners and dodge responsibility. He whines, complains, and resists almost everything asked of him, yet the last coherent words Shiuli utters in the film are about him.

Just like the flowers that she names after, Shiuli falls. But that’s the aching beauty of the shiuli flowers: Their scent fills the air, long after they fall.  

 "These flowers don't last long," says Shiuli's mother Vidya in October. 

 Maybe that's why Shiuli too dropped early, answers Dan. 

She will no longer be the Shiuli that Dan and we once knew, yet her comatose presence gives his life a strange new purpose. He becomes almost haunted by a single question: why did she ask for him? “How can I tell her where I was?” he asks frantically. Could he have meant something more to this soft-spoken colleague than he ever realised?

Desperate for an answer, Dan keeps returning to Shiuli’s bedside, caring for her and tending to her, almost to the point of forgetting the rest of his responsibilities.

The rest of the hotel staff have to move on as they say, because life has to be lived, yet, for Dan, life is at Shiuli’s bedside. No one can quite understand his determination: Far from being in love, Dan and Shiuli were friends, but not close ones for him to feel so deeply attached.

 Is Shiuli fully aware of what Dan is doing for her?

We like to believe that she does, till the very end, we believe, just like Dan. 

But life’s miracles are not always tangible.  

 We won’t hear from her, but her searching eyes carry the presence of unshed tears and the weight of emotions. Sandhu’s debut is soft, and tender and her mastery resides in just micro-expressions. Dhawan is brilliant; far from the machoisms that we normally know him for. He shows the evolution of a man, growing from immaturity to developing a gentle sense of empathy. Another standout, is Gitanjali Rao, as Shiuli’s mother. Every scene that she is in, is a punch to the heart.

The film moves with an unhurried rhythm, carried by soft melancholic tunes and the lingering fragrance of flowers. Shoojit Sircar’s direction and Juhi Chaturvedi’s writing give us a love story wrapped in grief, yet touched by hope. Sometimes, perhaps, the light is not waiting at the end of the tunnel, it exists in the crack of a skylight.