The Heist:
It seems entirely possible that the clever title was thought up first, and then a script written around a character called Sikandar, whose fate is like a drunken driver on a hairpin bend and Sikandar Ka Muqaddar (on Netflix) came into being.
Neeraj Pandey has a filmography full of thrillers (A Wednesday, Baby, Special 26) and evidently enjoys the genre. The new film is a crime caper, but on an intimate scale – no shootouts and car chases—more a Sleuth-like (famous play by Anthony Shaffer) mind game.
Rare and expensive diamonds are stolen from a gems exhibition. Sub-Inspector Jaswinder Singh (Jimmy Shergill) is given the case and he comes with a reputation for having a hundred percent detection rate. Going by what he believes is his infallible instinct, he picks out three suspects from among the hundreds present at the venue—Sikandar (Avinash Tiwary), a computer technician, Kamini (Tamannaah Bhatia), an employee of the diamond company and her senior Mangesh (Rajeev Mehta). The cop is sure one or all of them pulled off the theft.
On the basis of his instinct, the three are arrested and tortured, but none of them admits to the robbery. Jaswant gets increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress on the case and goes out of the way to make life hell for Sikandar. He loses his job, cannot pay the rent on his house or afford the lawyer’s fee. His mother dies, and when he is desperate, a friend finds him a job in Agra. In the meantime their shared trauma brings Sikandar and Kamini together, and they get married making a family with her son from an earlier marriage and her sister.
Just when they are settling down, Sikandar gets a court summons and has to go to Mumbai to prove that he is not an absconder. When he returns, the cycle of misery repeats—again he loses his job and home, and Kamini falls ill.
Eventually, he rebuilds his life in Abu Dhabi, and is about to return to Mumbai after 15 years. In the interim, Jaswinder’s life unravels too, his wife (Divya Dutta) divorces him, he is sacked for drinking on the job, but that unsolved case still haunts him.
When he was being beaten in the lock-up, Sikandar had told Jaswinder that when he realizes his mistake, he should look him in the eye and apologise “like a man.” After 15 years, Jaswinder calls Sikandar to meet him so that he can finally offer that long-pending apology. The plot unfolds mostly in flashbacks—what Jaswinder put Sikandar through, and what made him so obsessed over one case where his instinct failed.
A viewer used to the twists of Hindi cinema would see the surprise coming much before it arrives; there are quite a few contrivances, but writer-director Neeraj Pandey still manages to engage the viewer in the predator-prey circling of the two men, when neither is willing to yield an inch.
Jimmy Shergill has played the world-weary cop too many times for this role to be particularly challenging, but is always able to add a spark of excitement to his roles. Avinash Tiwary is an apt foil for Shergill and the two make Sikandar Ka Muqaddar an enjoyable watch.
(This piece first appeared in seniorstoday.in)
