Gehraiyaan: A film review from a psychological lens
The story on inter-generational trauma we never knew we needed
Please note: Major spoilers ahead, so I’d suggest watching the movie before you read on.
Trigger warnings: Suicide, Domestic violence, Childhood trauma, Anxiety, infidelity.
As therapists in training, we’re always asked the one question — What is your biggest no-go when it comes to therapy? This question essentially tries to gauge the client populations or groups we absolutely cannot work with or empathise with through our work. My two no-gos when I began training in psychotherapy were perpetrators of Child Sexual Abuse and/or Paedophilia as well as partners who demonstrated infidelity in their romantic relationships. But my couples therapy professor sought to challenge the latter by introducing me to the work of Esther Perel — a celebrated Couples therapist who works with infidelity in marriage alongside straying partners and allows such couples to engage in what she refers to as “repairing ruptures” in the relationship. She doesn’t subscribe to the idea that cheating is morally wrong. But rather invites the aggrieved party to ask the question — What was missing in our relationship that made you stray from it? What did our love lack that made you choose to look for something outside of our relationship? Is there a disconnect in the way that we have come to love each other over the years?
Esther Perel was able to move beyond the coloured binaries of good and bad and right and wrong for one simple reason — she didn’t view infidelity as the end of a relationship. She always saw infidelity as a relationship’s cry for help. I don’t think, I, as a therapist, have reached that level of understanding about infidelity. But I have definitely veered towards understanding what was lacking in the relationship to warrant cheating. Therefore, it was with a pinch of salt and a dash of scepticism that I watched the movie Gehraiyaan. For I was sure that this movie would “normalise cheating” with Indian audiences coming to view infidelity as something to covet. But boy was I wrong. Trust me as a therapist, being called out for our limitations in understanding is quite a jarring experience and it happens ever so often due to the complexity of our profession.
At the outset, the film appears to be a sordid tale rife with steamy sex scenes and scandalous bouts of cheating. However, while the movie makes for a great viewing experience with seductive locales, steamy sex scenes and copious amounts of drama, deceit and scandal, peppered with music that is just the right amount of sultry — the movie Gehraiyaan has received recognition for all the wrong reasons. The name of the movie is uncannily apt because there are depths to the storyline that surface if only you know where to look within the murky waters of infidelity. Join me as I deep dive into the deep end with this one — exploring the impact of dysfunctional family patterns, childhood trauma, the lifelong impact of abuse and suicide and most importantly unhealthy relational dynamics that carry forward across generations and quite possibly lifetimes.
The opening scene of the movie sets the centre stage for the sordid tale to follow. We view the scene from a child’s eye as she witnesses her listless, despondent mother interacting with an aggressive, punitive father. This point is crucial for understanding the concept of triangulation. A concept from family therapy — Triangulation talks about how the distress between couples is sometimes relieved with the involvement of a third entity. This entity could be another person: a child, a parent figure, a relative or even a close confidante to the couple. It could also be something the two halves of the couple can rely on as a distraction such as an overinvolvement at work or an overindulgence with a substance such as alcohol. If we take Alisha (played by Deepika Padukone) to be the 3rd point of this triangle, we can also see another unhealthy relational dynamic coming to the fore — the drama triangle. The drama triangle refers to 3 parties in a relational dynamic — the victim, the perpetrator and the rescuer. No points for guessing whom Alisha identifies herself as in this drama triangle. At several points of the movie, Alisha harps on the feelings of helplessness that her mother felt in being married to her father. This goes to show that Alisha was enmeshed with her mother and actually took on her mother’s feelings of helplessness and thus experienced a total loss of control in her life. Witnessing this unhealthy parental dynamic forges our protagonist into what we often refer to, in therapist parlance, as a parentified child. In simple terms, it refers to a child who lost their childhood due to being made to take on the role of parenting their parents. In Alisha’s case, it involved caregiving for an alcoholic father and when she was grown up even forgoing her youth to battle against debilitating financial constraints by being the sole breadwinner of the family.
Let’s cut to the point at which Alisha meets Zain (played by Siddhant Chaturvedi) — the rich, flamboyant and charismatic anti-hero of our story. It doesn’t take a keen eye to sniff out the instant chemistry and attraction that is bubbling between these two. At the surface, Alisha looks like a woman who is simply enamoured by his bank balance and the Great Gatsbyian lifestyle he leads (The proverbial gold digger if you will). Most viewers like me felt that she was possibly leaning into Zain as a potential investor in her app.
But as the plot began to unfurl, it was possible to enter into the crevices and depths of Alisha’s childhood wounds. It was more important to notice not what Zain possessed by means of wealth, but rather what his attentions represented for Alisha. He represented the financial security that neither her long-term boyfriend Karan nor her father could provide her with.
This helps put into perspective her obvious attraction towards Zain. But this makes us wonder, it takes two to tango — therefore what makes Zain simultaneously gravitate towards Alisha?
There’s finally some light reflected in the trenches of Zain’s past when he talks about his abuse riddled childhood. His father physically beat his mother and despite all his efforts to rescue his mother from the wife beater that was his father, she chose to stay in the marriage (I use the word chose in italics because some women have very limited choice in leaving an abusive partner and therefore staying is not a choice but the only choice available to them). This left Zain’s inner child wounded with the sense of being trapped. He even acknowledges that a part of him felt abandoned by his mother (even though it was his mother who abandoned her safety to remain in the marriage- note enmeshment with mother’s feelings, here too). In this way, we see Zain’s childhood flash before his eyes and it gives us insight into why he veers into the murky waters of unethical non-monogamy a.k.a cheating on his fiancée. The ability to leave relationships at will gives Zain’s inner child the power that was not accorded to him and his mother. His cheating escapades allow him to feel that he has options and that he is not “trapped” in any relationship. Even Alisha echoes these sentiments in an old video montage when she feels anxious and suffocated in her sweater and cries to her mother saying “I’m stuck, I’m stuck. I can’t breathe ma”.
Therefore with Alisha clambering onto any sense of financial stability and security and freedom from the suffocation she felt growing up and Zain seeking to escape anything that encumbers his freedom (resulting in him feeling trapped). Together they form a kind of twisted symbiotic relationship that is driven by their unmet childhood needs. They represent the Ying yang of dysfunctional relationships, demonstrating why we often subconsciously gravitate towards partners of a familiar childhood wounding.
Here, comes in Tia (played by Ananya Pandey) who appears to be a woman drowning in privilege with everything in life handed to her on a silver platter. Therefore, naturally, sympathy is harder to come by for her even though she is being blatantly cheated on throughout the film. However, in the penultimate part of the movie, when it is revealed that it was Tia’s father (Alisha’s uncle) that was cheating on her mother with Alisha’s mom (Tia’s aunt) when we realise that we are all aboard a slowly sinking ship. We realise that Tia was, in fact, protecting her mother by not revealing that the Alibag property was actually swindled from Alisha’s father. But, here is where the plot thickens (and I mean this from a solely psychological standpoint), we can see clearly how trauma traverses nautical miles when left unchecked. History repeats itself and we see Tia once again thrashing in the deep end with a man who is trying to cheat her of money, very much like the father figure she had growing up.
Eerily enough, the iceberg finally rears its ugly head, when we see Alisha (in an extra-dyadic relationship) and Zain (trapped in his own financial schemes) in the same place their parents had once been. In fact, despite all his declarations about how wrong his father has been, he chose to resort to violence when he felt cornered and feared exposure on the boat. This is not to say that abusers turn into abusers as that would be a gross oversimplification of things. But rather it reflects that a large part of our coping mechanisms is learned from our parent figures.
But this brings us to the part of intergenerational trauma that is most interesting — while we may encounter or find ourselves gravitating towards spaces that feel familiar due to our childhood wiring, we are not slated to repeat the past. This is where I strongly divest from Freud’s ideas. The focal point of his theory of psychoanalysis has always been to view childhood as the epicentre of the entirety of human existence with the resounding belief that all our present actions are driven by past circumstances. Contesting this is not to say that our past doesn’t push us, break us or drive us to do certain things. But if you ask me, there lies a key difference between being shaped by the past and being defined by it. To say that we are deadlocked by our past to act in pre-determined ways not only takes away the agency from the person but also envisages them as incapable of being divorced from their past. Both of which are dismally disempowering perspectives to hold onto. However, this kind of thinking has unfortunately subliminally trickled into our collective psyche.
Unfounded statements like “Oh he is carrying a lot of emotional baggage from his past” have found themselves inextricably part of our everyday parlance. The troubling bit about this is that no one will ever let him know that he can put down the baggage whenever he chooses to.
Let us take Zain’s example to illustrate this point further: From his account, it is clear that his father demonstrated aggressive tendencies that translated into his engagement in domestic violence against his mother. While this may genetically lend him a predisposition to developing a short-tempered temperament along with traits of impulsivity or lack of inhibitory control, the ultimate decision to engage in a scuffle with Alisha on the boat was his and his alone.
While not intending to invalidate his past trauma, what I am trying to say and this is something I often try to explain to clients, is that —
There are always four choices one can make in life: One is to learn nothing from the past and choose to repeat it, two is to do the polar opposite to compensate for the past that was, three is to be so fearful of the past so as to make the choice to do nothing (for inaction is also action) and four is to make informed choices with the knowledge of the past without being driven by the fear of it.
The past may have left an indelible mark but the future is yet to be written. Whether we choose to be a slave to our past or whether we choose to break our shackles to the past is in itself a choice left entirely to us.
To tie everything together, I would like to say that the whole purpose behind diving into the deep, dark recesses of intergenerational trauma is not to say that families are doomed for generations to come. But rather to shine a light on the fact that it only takes one member, one branch of the family tree to break apart from the cyclical pain to heal the years of trauma residing in the family roots.
Comment and let me know whether you think any of the characters of the film were able to break apart from the bonds of intergenerational trauma.
- Veha Pandya
Taking a trauma-informed approach to therapy
