Even after a decade, Piku’s wound still refuses closure. Earlier this month, it saw a celebratory return to the Indian theatres. Set against the backdrop of urban dislocation, the film reveals how care, entwined with modern anxieties around health and autonomy, becomes both a struggle and an act of love. Here, endurance takes centre stage and heroism lies not in transcendence but in the raw, repetitive acts of showing up.
Piku isn’t a film that presents itself with stillness or ease, within moments we’re dropped steadfast into its central conflict, the three Cs of Piku: chaos, conflict, and constipation. In the Banerji household, the hullabaloo is ambient and relentless. It’s not just about food or medicine, it’s about the rituals around them, the way every small bodily need is magnified into an existential crisis. Everything is always urgent and bodily, never philosophical or resolved. And yet, it is through this visceral lens that the film dissects something much softer: a daughter’s slow, exhausted unravelling.
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Intimacy As A Chore
For a film named after its protagonist, Piku (Deepika Padukone) rarely occupies the foreground of her own life. Her personhood is tethered to her father’s every whim, she is as entangled with Bhashkor (Amitabh Bachchan) as much as she is estranged from herself. There is something devastating in how she moves through the world: a woman raised to be entirely self-sufficient, trained to mother herself, to anticipate her needs as efficiently as she meets others’. She yearns for intimacy yet treats it like a function to be met, a chore to be checked off: necessary, transactional, solvable. The tragedy of Piku is that in the effort to raise a feminist daughter, Bhashkor inadvertently created a woman who cannot separate agency from obligation. She has the freedom to walk away, but no inner permission to exercise it.
The Post-Renaissance Bengali Man
Bhashkor is more than just a difficult father. He is a figure who carries the lingering entitlement of a certain kind of Bengali man: the post-Renaissance, upper-caste intellectual who both critiques and clings to modernity. His decay is not just physical, it’s ideological. His body fails him, but his desire to control, to interrupt, to define the world around him through his own moral lens remains intact. He speaks over his daughter when introduced to a suitor, positioning her not as a woman with desires of her own but as an extension of his progressive parenting. He thus empties her of agency even as he touts her independence. And yet, Piku does not vilify him. It bears witness to the fact that love can be profoundly inconvenient, that dependency can masquerade as virtue, that even the most frustrating forms of care come laced with tenderness.
Amitabh Bachchan as Bhashkor in Piku
In doing so, Piku asks a difficult question with no clean answer: what does it mean to stay, to endure, to tether oneself to a responsibility towards one’s parents which is both chosen and inherited? In a time when mobility has never been easier – when trains, flights, and even technology facilitate communication, staying connected to one’s parents has still somehow become harder. Distance has found subtler forms: emotional voids, spatial constraints, unresolved childhoods, the quiet corrosion of intimacy over time.
And yet, Piku chooses to stay. When Rana (Irrfan Khan) reminds Piku, “I hope you realise he’s a selfish father”, his voice laced with exasperation and perhaps his own unresolved grievances, she replies with an unflinching certainty: “No, he’s not. Even if he is, he’s my father”. It’s not a line meant to convince or provoke; it simply is. A declaration of allegiance to something messy and ancient, something that resists explanation. Perhaps it was the quietest nudge to Rana, who needs to soften up to his mother. Piku doesn’t romanticise the bond or sanitise the emotional labour, she embodies it. Her acts are mundane – coordinating medical schedules, bearing the brunt of irrational fears, absorbing a hundred little inconveniences – but they are deeply political in their refusal to discard the parent who raised her, no matter how difficult he has become.
Between Will And Wildness
Piku has many prophecy-like moments, suggesting that existence teeters between will and wildness, between the illusion of control and the inevitability of release. When Bhashkor collapses after an uncharacteristically indulgent night of drinking and dancing, he awakens not with regret, but with clarity. Hooked to oxygen tanks and reduced to a body monitored by tubes, his only demand is disarmingly simple: to return to Kolkata. It feels less like a decision and more like an instinct – an intuitive hit delivered at a liminal hour, a gesture towards dying on one’s own terms, free from medical torture. His urgency isn’t loud or performative; it is internal and ancient, like some animals knowing where to go when it’s time to die. Dr. Shrivastav’s sardonic premonition, that one day Bhashkor will have “the best shit of his life” and then pass on peacefully, blends comedy with existential weight.
A Hyper-Aware Society
Constipation here is not merely physiological; it’s metaphorical. It becomes the site upon which modernity’s cultural and emotional blockages are projected. Piku captures, with sobering precision, a hypochondriac society unravelling under the weight of its own self-surveillance. Diseases, uncertainties, the claustrophobia of modern cities, and the illusion of control through disciplined routines – all of it culminates in a kind of spiritual constipation. We are watching and dissecting ourselves too closely, reading symptoms and consuming wellness content like a ritualistic plea for longevity. And while there is merit in awareness, in prevention, there is also the violence of fearing death so much that we forget how to live. Ageing, in this paradigm, is pathologised – every wrinkle, every tremor is medicalised, medicated, made into data. And yet, no number of pills or charts can give meaning to the end.
Death As A Relic
Bhashkor himself did not see death as something morbid or terrifying. Instead, he treated it like routine, like medicine, like bowel movement: clinical, consequential, and oddly serene. Bhashkor’s medicine box travelled with him like a second body. After his passing, it remains beside his bed like a relic. In Piku’s gentle touch, it transforms from a lifeless object into a piece of memory, grief, and absurd intimacy.
Bhashkor calls ‘Chhobi Mashi’ illiterate, mocking her multiple marriages with a casual cruelty masked as wit and “low IQ”. Piku, half-amused and half-exhausted, quips, “Constipation ke alawa inko aurton se bhi problem hai“. It’s a line delivered with biting accuracy because beneath Bhashkor’s so-called progressiveness, his advocacy for his daughter’s independence and his disapproval of traditional marriages, lurks a deep entitlement. He champions autonomy, but only when it serves him. The film subtly critiques patriarchs who adopt feminist language without relinquishing control. Meanwhile, Bhashkor distorts even the act of motherhood, claiming, “I gave birth to you” at a family dinner, as if he alone possesses Piku as an extension of himself, hijacking the maternal bond, displacing her mother’s memory, collapsing all relationships into his own need.
The Disruptively Calm Rana
Piku’s refusal of marriage is not cast in tragedy but choice, nor has she once turned to a man for rescue. She does not need defending from her father’s tantrums or shielding from his neuroses. Her strength is silent, not performative; it is assumed and lived. Yet Rana’s presence – strange, disruptive, calming, enters not as saviour, but as witness. His own comical and repetitive sparring with his mother mirrors the chaos in Piku’s home, setting an unspoken ground for camaraderie. There’s a recognition there, muddled in irritation and accidental tenderness. In the car, somewhere between monotony and exhaustion, Bhashkor’s guilt-laced statement, “You think I’m a burden, but I can manage on my own”, hangs in the air, thick and untrue.
Irrfan Khan as Rana
It is Rana who interrupts, gently but with precision, naming what is often left unsaid in Indian households: that emotional blackmail is a form of control, that the myth of parental infallibility is a curated illusion, and that righteousness, especially when weaponised, can erase the reality of flawed, deeply human parents. Piku and Rana keep circling back to a need for peace, for mutual respect, and a subtle, profound reliance that does not seek to possess. Their connection resists definition. It is friendship, flirtation and the comfort of presence without the demand of outcome. The film doesn’t force a resolution between them, there is no triumphant confession or cinematic kiss. Only glances, a language of restraint, and the quiet intimacy of shared fatigue.
What Remains Unsaid
And then, there’s Piku’s biting. A motif so delicate, so strange, it teeters between mischief and meaning. Quite a few instances within the film see her biting perhaps a bedsheet, a fruit or her finger while talking to Rana. In another fleeting scene, she bites her lip while watching schoolgirls walk by, eyes soft, faraway, a glimpse of a woman longing for girlhood. It is a subconscious ache to return to the meaning of her own name: innocence and sweetness. This is where the film locates its emotional density in what’s not said, in the ways we fold into ourselves, in the impossible task of staying soft in a world that constantly demands toughness.
There’s a tactile intimacy to food in Piku, in lingering close-ups, whether it’s the chai being poured into cups, the grimy sink, or hands passing on the mutton curry. These images speak not just to sustenance, but to the interconnectedness of life’s small details. As Rana observes, Bhashkor links everything to his stomach, seeing every problem as a loop that inevitably circles back to where it began. The road trip from Delhi to Kolkata is not an escape but a reluctant crawl back to where it all began: Champakunj, an old, crumbling haveli in North Kolkata. Piku recasts constipation not just as Bhashkor’s ailment, but as a symbol of urban alienation, of families stuck in cycles of care without communication, of the body mirroring longing for a certain time, place or person. Kolkata is not romanticised in this return; it is remembered. The city’s familiar details, the yellow taxis, the street vendors, the trams, and the slowness of it all, are heavy with history and time.
The Eternal Return
This emotional architecture of return to Kolkata is also seen in films like The Namesake, where Gogol’s journey to Kolkata after his father’s death is not a homecoming, but an unwelcome confrontation with a place he barely knows, where grief ties him to a heritage he has distanced himself from. Both Piku and The Namesake understand that returning is not about rediscovery, but often about confronting the unresolved. In Kahaani, the return is even more complicated, disguised as a search. Vidya Bagchi’s arrival in Kolkata, weighed down by the mystery of her missing husband, turns the city into a co-conspirator, offering clues, distractions, and dangers. Kolkata here is not ornamental; it is maternal in a different way – fiercely protective, unknowable, and complicit in transformation. The act of returning in these films is not grandiose, but grounding.
So, what does it mean to pass away with dignity in a world that doesn’t know how to rest? Where knowing becomes a kind of curse, an anxiety-riddled compulsion to prepare for everything, to never be caught off guard? The balance between readiness and surrender becomes almost impossible to find. Bhashkor’s fixation on his gut, at first comical, begins to mirror society’s broader fixation with control; everything must function, flow, be measured and managed. And in that obsessive management, we often lose touch with the tenderness of simply being.
While road movies traditionally symbolise freedom, reinvention, or escape, Piku’s road journey offers no such promise of instant liberation. Shreya Ghoshal and Anupam Roy’s liminal “Journey Song” is interrupted by the path, instead filled with exhaustion, logistical complexity, and caretaking. It’s not a journey of self-discovery but one where burdens intensify, and the road itself becomes a microcosm of the ongoing struggle to care for a loved one.
No Grand Gestures Here
Despite a decade of its release and return to cinemas earlier this month, the film resists closure, ringing true even today, looping through days that seem to repeat, aspirations that stall and unresolved pasts in hometowns. Hauntology frames this narrative, with ancestral homes and Bhaskor’s presence lingering long after his passing, a constant reminder of what cannot be let go. In stripping away transformation and reward, Piku proposes that the quiet, often invisible acts of care – feeding, driving, enduring – hold a monumental weight in their ordinariness. It dismantles traditional notions of heroism. No character makes grand gestures or sacrifices. Yet, every simple action, like managing illness, navigating the road, caring for someone, becomes an epic in its mundane reality. In this redefinition of heroism, Piku shows that survival, showing up without expectation of reward or transformation, is the truest form of strength.
[The author is a documentary filmmaker and an entertainment writer based in Mumbai. Her recently co-directed documentary film, ‘Because I Couldn’t Stop For Death’, won an award for Best Documentary (Critic’s Choice) at the International Kolkata Short Film Festival.]
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
