Who will finish Sushant Singh Rajput’s sweet song of life now?

Dil Bechara was Sushant Singh Rajput’s last onscreen appearance.

Despite pronouncing “nothing is forever,” she can’t resist falling in love with Manny, who completes her in a way. Together, they become obsessed with a singer called Abhimanyu Veer, in particular with his one song and why he left it incomplete. To find out more, they decide to meet the musician in Paris, where he’s now living as a recluse. Abhimanyu is Saif Ali Khan in man bun, with a grumpy attitude to match. “Can you live happily after your loved one is gone?” asks Kizie, when they meet in a restaurant. The exchange hits a wrong note when Abhimanyu erupts into a fury. “It is illegal to die by suicide. So you must live,” he says, at one point. That line assumes a sense of sinister forewarning given Sushant’s untimely death. As to why that song was left unfinished, Abhimanyu puts on a snarky show, “kyuni yeh saali life hi adhoori hai.” Naturally, the young lovers are shaken by Abhimanyu’s caustic comments. Flanked by the Seine in the City of Love, Sushant reassures Kizie, “I will finish that song for you.” Later, as the end nears for all three pivotal characters, a mock funeral is held for Manny in a cathedral. It’s a celebration of a short life but one lived well and one that brought smiles to others. In his eulogy, JP says, “It’s best that I am blind because I don’t want to see a world that doesn’t have Manny.” Casting honcho Mukesh Chhabra’s directorial debut, Dil Bechara is dedicated to Sushant, with the message, “You will be missed.”

It’s not the first time that Sushant’s character has died in a movie. On screen, death has frequently come to him in all sizes. In his maiden Kai Po Che!, he plays Ishaan, a cricketer with lost potential who has to fall back on mentoring a cricket academy. The 2013 film serves up a heady cocktail of religion, communal conflict, sports and friendship. Against the backdrop of Gujarat riots, Ishaan who has taken a Muslim boy under his wing is shot by his best friend Omi (Amit Sadh). Son of a priest, Omi has grown into a Hindu fundamentalist whereas Ishaan remains staunchly secular and dies as one. Kedarnath (2018) has him embrace a martyr’s death set against the Uttarakhand flood disaster while a dacoit’s fateful end awaits him in Sonchiriya (2019).

MS Dhoni: The Untold Story was a benchmark in Sushant Singh Rajput’s career.

There’s little doubt that Sushant’s ordinary characters with extraordinary will power and charismatic presence — a combination of headstrong, vulnerable, flawed, sensitive, hopeful, helpless, nervous, desperate, confident, illogical and morally tough — have penetrated deep into the audiences’ hearts. Many of Sushant’s films have tackled friendship in which he comes across as the dreamer and the one to reach for the stars. Anyone could have played M.S. Dhoni in the 2016 biopic, so what made Sushant a natural fit for it? The Patna native shared the same background as the legend he was incarnating on screen. Like Dhoni, Sushant was an epitome of middle-class dreams and small-town aspirations. Critics called M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story hagiography. True, it is awfully in love with its subject but Dhoni’s rags-to-riches story suited Sushant just fine. What stood out was the dreams and the outsized talent that made it possible for the Ranchi boy to become a quintessentially Indian icon. It mirrored Sushant’s situation in Bollywood — the outlier on his way to stardom, before death snatched him away.

In less than a decade, Sushant, like his idol Shah Rukh Khan before him, had danced past the soapy success (Ekta Kapoor’s long running Pavitra Rishta) to quickly become one of Bollywood’s most promising young stars. It has been a short but substantial innings. Famously, he had dropped out of engineering to pursue acting. As it turned out, 2019’s Chhichhore yanked him back to the campus. It is director Nitesh Tiwari’s nostalgia trip to his own IIT days, especially its adventurous hostel life. Co-starring Shraddha Kapoor and Varun Sharma, the film gives Sushant one of his finest screen turns. He’s a father whose disturbed son has just attempted suicide because he feared the world would judge him a ‘loser.’ There’s always a plan for success, never for misfires. We never prepare our children for failure, Sushant’s character Aniruddh observes, a realisation that dawns on him only when faced with the prospect of losing his son, now battling for life in a hospital with serious injuries. As the son recovers, his biggest learning from his near fatal accident is, “The most important thing in life is life itself.” Watching Chhichhore on Sushant’s first death anniversary, you wonder if only he had walked away with that all-crucial lesson of courage and survival from one of his bravura films. If only in his weakest moment he had shown faith in his own stroke of genius.

Sushant Singh Rajput starred in Nitesh Tiwari directorial Chhichhore.

In the past year, Sushant’s death has snowballed into a movement — nay, revolution — of the kind Bollywood hasn’t witnessed in decades. It has been a collective national grieving. Even at a time when Covid-19 corpses piled up high all we could talk about was just the one death that mattered, which preoccupied us and worried us no end. The questions that drive Chhichhore — success, failure, hope, competition, winner, loser, how to cope in times of crisis, giving your best shot and lastly, effort counts, not the result — are the same that afflicted Sushant’s life and haunted his death. Was he a victim of nepotism and turf wars? Was he shortchanged by the Hindi industry? If he was clinically depressed as news reports suggest and didn’t leave a suicide note behind, is it fair to blame anyone for his death? Will his departure be a wake up call to the clubby Bollywood elite and at the least, bring accountability in an industry dubious for putting family connections over gifts of talent?

Meanwhile, the SSR fans continue to cry on behalf of their crucified hero for justice. In this striking cabal of admirers, justice-seekers, warriors, media, shouting anchors, politicians, Twitteratis, Bollywood bashers and fence-sitters, who can come forward to give Sushant’s sweet song of life a touch of closure and completion? Anyone, there?