


They slowly fall for each other, leading to emotional turmoil. There, she meets Zafar (Varun Dhawan), a blacksmith, and sparks fly. She manipulates a kind-hearted Satya into getting her permission to learn classical singing from famed courtesan Bahar Begum, who resides in the infamous Heera Mandi. She gets married to Dev but soon finds herself to be a lonely bahu with nothing to do. She remembers an impoverished music teacher of her acquaintance who has three daughters and requests that his elder daughter Roop (Alia Bhatt) comes and live with them so that both she and her husband can know each other better. She wants her husband Dev Chaudhary (Aditya Roy Kapur) to be well-settled before she passes away. Satya Chaudhary (Sonakshi Sinha) is dying of cancer and doesn’t have much time to live. Then, in the latter part of the film, when a train crowded with refugees leaves the station, the cancer of Partition manifests itself ever so briefly, taking away the false veneer of a dreamscape filled with beautiful locations and beautiful people, shaking us rudely out of our enchantment. The Raavan dahan sequence looks like a top Broadway production. You feel as if a dream is floating by in front of your eyes. The lake connecting to it seems like something out of Venice. The grand sets of Bahar Begum's (Madhuri Dixit) haveli are something straight out of the famous Versailles Palace in France. You marvel at the attention to detail as the fictional Husnabad comes alive in front of your eyes. The opulence of the film almost blinds you. Karan Johar is known for his larger-than-life films but this one, produced by him and directed by Abhishek Varman, beats them all by a mile.
