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Directed by: Satyen Bose
Music: Shankar-Jaikishan
Lyrics: Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri
Starring: Nargis, Pradeep Kumar,
Feroz Khan, Harindranath Chattopadhyay,
Anwar Hussain, Anoop Kumar,
KN Singh, Leela Misra,
SN Bannerjee, Laxmi Chhaya |
Raat aur Din begins, as do
all good psychological dramas, on a dark, rainy night. A gate slams behind an ultra-sophisticated
woman (Nargis) who, clad in a glamorous evening gown, cigarette holder in hand,
hails a cab.
‘Firpo’s’, she tells the cabbie, and there, the patrons perk up as
she sashays in, the carefree Dil ki girah
khol do on her
lips. None more so than an attractive young man (Feroz Khan), who seizes the
opportunity to dance with this beautiful woman.
As the dance ends, they walk companionably to his
dinner table, where he orders two large whiskies. The young man is a bit taken
aback, when she asks him for a cigarette. He met her in Shimla, he tells her,
and it’s the woman’s turn to be surprised – she’s never been to Shimla. The
young man grins; they haven’t introduced themselves – he’s Dilip. Just as she’s
beginning to speak, there’s an interruption.
A man (Pradeep Kumar) rushes up to their table – he
wants ‘Baruna’ to come with him. Now! Who the hell is he? Her husband, he snaps.
The woman bursts out laughing – she’s not Baruna, she’s Peggy. And she’s not
married.
Dilip begins to intervene, but Pratap (that’s the
man’s name) has had enough. He punches Dilip and the two men have a set-to.
Which is when Peggy decides to do the flit. While Pratap mutinously returns to
his house to await his wife, Dilip walks slowly back to the table. He spots ‘Peggy’s’
handbag on the floor; inside is a card – Mrs Baruna Verma.
Meanwhile, at home, Pratap discovers that their bedroom
door is locked but Baruna doesn’t answer his calls. He sits outside, chain-smoking,
until in the early hours of dawn, Baruna comes out of the bedroom. A very
different Baruna, this – simply clad in a dressing gown, hair loose, face
scrubbed free of make-up… She’s solicitous as well – where was he last night?
When she woke up he was gone.
Pratap’s anger flares up again when Baruna denies
she ever went to Firpo’s or that she knows anyone named Dilip. The argument turns
serious when an angry Pratap pulls out a revolver to threaten Baruna. Dilip
walks in just then and matters get more confusing – Dilip insists he’d met Baruna
at a party a few years earlier in Shimla, and then, for the first time at Firpo’s
the previous night. Baruna denies knowing him at all, let alone dancing with
him.
Pratap is yelling, Dilip is protesting, and Baruna is almost in hysterics.
Amidst the confusion, she faints. The two men take Baruna to a psychiatrist, Dr Dey
(Harindranath Chattopadhyay), whose hospital is named Psycho Clinic. (?!) Dr
Dey and his assistant Dr Alvares (Anwar Hussain) discover that while Baruna
cannot remember anything of the previous night, let alone her past, she’s been
having frequent headaches.
She usually takes an aspirin and sleeps it off, she
tells them. With nothing to go on, Dr Dey is sure that the answer lies in
Baruna’s past. What can Pratap tell them about Baruna?
Pratap doesn’t know much. He’d met Baruna when his car broke down on the way to Shimla. The locals directed him to a contractor’s
house nearby. Unfortunately, his daughter, Baruna, could not offer him shelter;
her father is away in the jungles. But she provides him with some food and a
thermos of hot tea. The night is spent companionably enough (outside, due to a
fortuitous snake sighting) and by the time morning rolls around, Pratap is already
smitten.
Her father (KN Singh) arrives just as they are eating breakfast. Talking to the father, Pratap reveals that he was on
his way to Shimla to meet the daughter of a family friend. The news seems to
affect Baruna badly, though Pratap doesn’t understand why she’s so moody. In Shimla, Pratap, discovering that Sheila, the
girl he’d come to ‘see’ is not at home, makes his excuses and quickly returns
to Baruna. His roundabout proposal is met with a blushing ‘Papa se pooch
leejiye.’
Papa has no objections whatsoever, but Pratap’s ‘mummy’ (Leela Misra
being obnoxious as usual) is a different kettle of fish. ‘Go to see one girl
and get married to another?! (She has a point, there!)
Pratap’s father (SN Bannerjee) feels they shouldn’t
sacrifice their only son’s happiness (sensible chap) but even he cannot persuade
his wife to attend the wedding.
Strange things begin to happen on the wedding night
itself. Pratap wakes up in the middle of the night to discover Baruna missing.
When he discovers her lost in thought in the garden, she has no recollection of
how she’d reached there.
She also has frequent headaches, is terror-stricken
when a boulder rolls down the hill at a picnic, wanders around the house at night
(frightening the devil out of her poor father-in-law) and dances in the dark while
the household slumbers. One morning, Baruna is surprised when her
sister-in-law questions her about the previous night – she’d had a headache and
had taken an aspirin before going to sleep. How could she have been dancing?
But her husband and mother-in-law saw her? Strange!
‘Strange,’ echoes Baruna’s father to whom Pratap
addresses his concerns. This has never happened before. Meanwhile, Pratap’s mom, declaring ‘Bahu’s
possessed’, invites an ojha to exorcise the ‘spirit’, despite her husband’s misgivings.
Informed by his sister, Pratap arrives just in time
to see the ojha burn Baruna’s hand. Livid, he turns on his mother, and takes
a now-laughing, now-crying Baruna away from his parental home.
They move to
Calcutta, where Pratap hopes Baruna will be normal again They are very happy for a while, until at a party, a
drink is forced upon Baruna. (She throws away the first drink but is offered a
doctored soft drink.) When Pratap sees her again, Baruna is drunk.
As always
with such episodes, it ends with Baruna losing consciousness. And having no
recollection of it the next morning. Baruna is embarrassed when she learns of her
behaviour the previous day, but Pratap reassures her.
Soon, Pratap has to leave for Dhanbad. When he returns a couple of days later, he
discovers that the bottles of liquor that he’d left behind in the bedroom are
now in the bathroom cabinet – empty. Baruna denies any knowledge of them. That night, Baruna sets off on her nighttime
wanderings again – Pratap wakes up just in time to see her hail a taxi.
This is Pratap's story. The doctors suspect the root cause lies in Baruna’s
past – before Pratap met her. What can Dilip fill in? Not much; Dilip remembers
meeting Baruna at a Christmas party in Shimla. He was visiting a friend there. Dr Dey requests Dilip to find out what he
can, and Dr Alvares asks Pratap to admit Baruna to the hospital – they need to keep
her under observation.
The new house surgeon, Dr Kumar (Anoop Kumar) is
understandably overwhelmed by Baruna – he finds her whistling in the dark, she
bums a cigarette off him, flirts with him, compels him to dance with her, demands
a drink, and generally makes his life miserable.
Just when the poor man is at
his wits’ end, he’s rescued by a knock on the door – it’s Drs Alvarez and
Mehta. ‘Peggy’ has no clue who they are; but as they
watch, she loses consciousness and turns into Baruna – a Baruna who not only
recognises the doctors but is stunned by the cigarette still in her hand and
her state of undress. Dr Alvarez’s questions only brings on another headache –
and a return to Peggy– furious, because there’s no music.
Baruna’s mental issues are increasing, ‘Peggy' taking over for longer periods. Drs Dey, Alvarez, Mehta – none of them know what’s
triggering these episodes. Pratap, helpless, is beginning to break, and his
mother doesn’t help matters – she wants him to divorce Baruna and marry Sheila.
And then… Baruna runs away from the clinic.
Will they ever find out the truth? Just what is the truth? Does it really lie in the past? The ending is intriguing – and unexpected.
Nargis could have done the quiet, good, Baruna role
in her sleep. But it's her turn as Peggy – wild, licentious, a woman who drinks,
smokes, dances with abandon, flirts with every man in sight – that’s a
revelation. Her change from Baruna to Peggy and back again – every nuance is
reflected on her expressive face.
The changes are like quicksilver – her eyes
and her body language say a lot more than dialogues, and yet, her voice
modulation makes every sentence quiver with appropriate emotion. Even if those
emotions change from laughter to sadness to anger to flirtatiousness within a scene.
That gamin charm is still on display even if this film had been a long time in
the making, and it shows in her physical features. She won a well-deserved
National Award for this performance, and it was a fitting swansong to a
glorious career.
I wish I could say the other characters were as fleshed
out. Unfortunately, in focusing on Baruna, they get shafted. Pratap, for
instance, is supportive enough of Baruna and is shown to be very understanding
of her illness, to the extent of being traumatised by her plight. Yet, his
character, who stands up for his wife in the early part of the film, is shown
to be rather spineless in the latter half. Feroz Khan gets even less to do,
though he’s certainly eye-candy. KN Singh is certainly not eye-candy, but he too, is in a blink-and-you-miss-it role.
I’m glad there weren’t many attempts at ‘comedy’
but even the songs (a beautiful score by Shankar-Jaikishan) weren’t fully incorporated
into the narrative. The title song, for instance, deserved a better fit into
the plot. (There seems to be a male solo version sung by Mukesh, but it wasn't there in the print I watched; in fact, I don't remember it in the film either.) The ‘picnic song’ was merely a filling; and how did Baruna get out of
the clinic to sing ‘Awara ae mera dil’? ‘Medical science’, of course, was as
imaginative as ever, but luckily, they didn’t spend too much time giving us
gyan about multiple personality disorder.
Tightly edited to around an hour and a half? This
film would have been a brilliant psychological suspense movie. Still, watch it
purely for Nargis – and a performance that has as many shades as the night and
day.
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