Paro Pinaki Ki Kahani is a socially conscious love story that unfolds far from cinema’s comfort zones, locating romance in spaces most films refuse to enter. Set on the fringes of everyday India, it follows Pinaki (Sanjay Bishnoi), a manhole cleaner condemned to invisible labour, and Mariyam, later known as Paro (Eshitta Singh), a vegetable vendor negotiating survival with quiet resilience. Their unlikely meeting point, the toilet of a moving train, becomes a paradoxical sanctuary, where anonymity offers dignity and stolen moments allow honesty to breathe.
What begins as hesitant conversation gradually grows into an emotional refuge for two people starved of affection and recognition. In these secret encounters, love emerges not as fantasy but as necessity. When Paro vanishes without explanation, the film shifts gears, transforming Pinaki’s grief into a search that is as much emotional as it is physical. His journey exposes entrenched caste hierarchies, systemic apathy and the brutal precarity of lives lived hand to mouth. The romance, by then, has expanded into a quiet act of resistance.
Made on a meagre budget, the film forces us to confront an India many prefer to ignore, where selling children becomes a survival tactic, where diving into a stinking sewer is not bravery but livelihood, and where grime settles so deeply into the skin that it ceases to register. Yet the film resists wallowing in misery. There are moments of grim humour, particularly when Pinaki uses street-smart cunning to manipulate the police into helping him find Mariyam. The film also refuses the comfort of a happy ending, staying true to the harsh reality that love rarely triumphs when society is stacked against it from the outset.
That said, the film is not without its flaws. The direction and screenplay could have been sharper and more cohesive. Certain narrative choices raise questions, particularly Mariyam’s portrayal as someone needing rescue, when those surviving at the margins often possess formidable instincts for escape. Her attempts to flee remain frustratingly unexplored. The Punjabi-heavy music score feels tonally misplaced in semi-rural Maharashtra, where Marathi folk would have lent greater authenticity. The decision to brownface Eshitta Singh is also puzzling and unnecessary, reinforcing troubling visual assumptions about class and complexion.
Both leads are sincere and committed, though their performances lack a fully lived-in texture. The supporting cast, too, could have been stronger. Still, the film deserves credit for foregrounding issues of untouchability, caste discrimination and violence against women with empathy and restraint. While it may not achieve the emotional and political heft of a Shyam Benegal film, Paro Pinaki Ki Kahani remains a well-intentioned, compassionate effort, one that may falter in execution but succeeds in reminding us that love, however fragile, can still take root in the most unforgiving terrain.
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