Early in Sriram Raghavan’s 2004 thriller Ek Hasina Thi , the suave Karan (Saif Ali Khan), who has insinuated himself into the life of the nervous Sarika (Urmila Matondkar), saves her from a band of thugs and sends them scurrying. Then, as the two of them drive away, he casually tells her these were kiraaye ke gunday , a setup to give him a chance to play hero.
Sarika — being disoriented and also not constitutionally equipped to deal with deadpan humour — is startled, then gasps in relief when she realises Karan is joking. But he unsettles her again by quipping that he’ll have to pay one of the men extra (“I broke his arm”) — and so it goes.
The problem with you is that you don’t know the difference between truth and lies, he tells her. But as the film continues, we see that he is willing to exploit this very quality. It’s one of many scenes that make the first half of this thriller so tense and edgy. We constantly wonder what Karan is up to, whether he is taking Sarika for a ride — and how far he will go.
Verbal games
Later, on re-watching the film, one realises there was no “logical” reason for Karan to play such verbal games. From the start, it’s obvious that Sarika is a bit of a square: she takes things at face value and would have been taken in without any of these double-and-triple bluffs. But Karan needlessly reveals things about himself, telling truths while couching them as jokey lies. This habit is summarised in a scene where he gets her to play a “five questions” game — the rule is that each answer must be a lie — and uses this façade to disclose that he is a gangster.
But the sly scenes are necessary for the film’s purpose — because though Sarika doesn’t know she is in a thriller, we the viewers do. We are expecting a few sleights of hand. And we know cinematic tropes, such as the one where the hero saves the heroine from a goon and they fall in love. It’s such an old device in Hindi cinema that the 1980 The Burning Train (which was not a twisted thriller) had some fun with it: buddies Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna take turns to play rogue and help each other “impress” the girls they like.
Ek Hasina Thi takes digs at other clichés too: when they first meet, Karan says “Beautiful!”, making Sarika uneasy; looking up to see that he is apparently admiring a paperweight, she smiles; but then he looks at her frankly and says he wasn’t talking about the paperweight. (A more regular scene would have let the innuendo stay as innuendo.)
In cahoots
It might be said that we have been invited to play a little game: we are in cahoots with the film, while Sarika is the foil, like one of the “humourless” people described by Martin Amis: “…the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter.” And this is why the second half of Ek Hasina Thi , while having its own merits, isn’t at the same level as a crafty work of suspense: because now Sarika is the one in control and we know almost everything that she is planning, or at least that she is out for revenge.
The Hindi film I am most reminded of when I watch the early scenes in Ek Hasina Thi isn’t, strictly speaking, from the suspense genre. It is Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bemisal , where the enigmatic anti-hero Sudhir (Amitabh Bachchan) engages in irreverent wordplay, unsettling his childhood friend and the woman he loves. By making tantalising references to a dark past and a history of mental illness, and cracking inappropriate jokes, Sudhir conceals his demons while holding them in plain view. His friends assume he is jesting, but there is more truth in his behaviour than they realise.
In that film, play-acting serves as a form of personal therapy, allowing Sudhir to express his dark, bitter side even as he works for the greater good. In Ek Hasina Thi , Karan does the opposite, but the principle is the same: revealing deep and self-implicating truths while pretending to lie.
The Delhi-based writer and film critic says he finds it easier to concentrate on specific scenes as he grows older.
