Choodi jo khanki, haathon mein
Yaad piya ki aane lagi
Haaye bheegi bheegi raaton mein
-Yaad Piya Ki Aane Lagi (1998), Falguni Pathak
Ok look, I’m a slut for the young love angle in music videos– stories of unrequited crushes, coy glances, misplaced affection for the Wrong People, cutesy gestures and extremely PG-13 hugging/hand-holding. And this was Falguni’s whole shtick. Most of her videos narrate cloyingly sweet tales of cishet young love (sometimes in rather bizarre ways). And Yaad Piya Ki Aane Lagi is arguably her most popular offering in this genre.
A very young Riya Sen has acquired tickets to a garba night and her friends are dying of excitement. Amid goofing around, they manage to go shopping, practice a hook step, get dressed and set off for the event. At the venue, tragedy strikes! Riya is the last to leave the car and gets her dupatta stuck in the now-locked door. Her friends have moved on without realising what’s wrong. It’s at times like this that I feel truly grateful for the invention of the cell phone. We take solutions to a variety of simple problems for granted because of them. So, we have Riya fruitlessly trying to pull her dupatta out of the door and it starts to rip. And then, help appears in the form of a young and dashing Kiran Janjani! The same dude she’d been eyeing from the store she’d gone shopping in! What a coincidence! He pulls a bobby pin out of her hair, unlocks the door and saves her dupatta. I’m thinking carjacking must have been at an all-time high in that era. Riya is thrilled and joins her friends at the party, even being invited to dance on stage with Falguni (who always appeared in her videos).
I think Yaad Piya Ki works so well because it manages to capture a specific Anticipation of being on the cusp of a very femme womanhood. The video isn’t really about Riya and Kiran. It’s about Riya and her schoolgirl friends reveling in the excitement of a grownup-night-out. The camera lingers on the rituals of grooming, dancing, crafting a Look with limited resources (that iconic blue lehenga!), all in exaggerated motions. Riya encountering a cute, older (possibly college-going?) guy and crushing on him is a part of the same heady, hormonal mix of feelings. Whether she sees him again, whether she ends up with him…answers to these questions would be anticlimactic. It’s all about the pleasure of looking forward to something, of a night ripe with possibilities, of adolescent longing that’s difficult to articulate.
