When cinema becomes more than just make-believe, it becomes timeless and grows old with us. Not all films have the capacity to transcend the screen or go from reel to real but if made with conviction, even flawed films speak to us in parts. Rewatching Naseeruddin Shah’s Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota revealed to me its flaws. It was not smoothly narrated and some tracks just did not work but it had an original and topical story. Bollywood clichés were  absent in an upredictable narrative that chooses to show us extreme close ups of a few diverse lives, all bound together by a common desire to flee their stifling lives, their restrictive coops to America.
Tilottma Punj (Konkana Sensharma) is newly married to her internet love Hemant (jimmy Shergill). She is a Bengali, he a Punjabi and their  idyll is interrupted when the groom leaves for America leaving his hassled bride to cope with his dysfunctional family. There are incisive, perceptive moments in this story that show us the power games played by a bitterly resentful  mother-in-law (an effective Carla Singh) to suppress Tilottma till one evening, she changes into her premarital denims and boards a plane to America to join her husband.
There is also the story of stockbroker Salim Rajabali (Irrfan Khan) who along with his brother (meaningfully named Javed!) has to flee to America to escape a murder rap. He is painfully in love with choreographer Namrata (Suhasini Mulay) who repels and attracts him in equal measure with her lack of scruples and  frightening sexuality. 
Then there is the soft-spoken, dreamy eyed and impoverished Rahul Bhide (Ankur Khanna), who nurses his delirious, sick father in a hell-hole while his friends benignly plot his departure to an American university. His unspoken love for a rich heiress Khushboo (Ayesha Takia) creates some gentle ripples in the story. 
The show piece story is that of Rajubhai Patel (Paresh Rawal) who charges in lakhs to take young people to America via his dandiya troupe. He lives a money driven, compact, bachelor’s life till his lost love Tara (Ratna Pathak Shah) reappears with her daughter.  Soon Tilottma, Rajubhai and Rahul are flying towards their dreams or are they? What Shah should be thanked for doing in this film most of all is to show characters  who are never given center stage in the youth, beauty and glamour obsessed Hindi film industry. He shows us the touching love between a married woman and her old love, a man who looks at her fading beauty and grey hair and says “You have not changed at all.’’
The scene between Ratna Pathak Shah and Paresh Rawal when he  tenderly snips away at her plaster to release her hand and sets a table for two with a plastic lamp in the middle is one of the most poignant depictions of love. There is also the middle-aged Suhasini Mulay who routinely plays a mother and mother-in-law in films and on TV  but is unabashedly though unconvincingly seductive here.
Rawal is heart-wrenchingly nostalgic as he tries to reconnect with his past. Irrfan is compellingly watchable. This is an actor who needs no props to make an impact like in the scene where he makes a long-distance call to the woman he both loves and hates and cries into his phone. 
Konkona is an absolute natural. Watch her in the prawn curry sequence where she is chattering away in Bengali on the phone and cooking and answering the door bell and back answering her infuriating mother-in-law. Pure brilliance. Imad showed off his mop of defiant curls and his pure, knife sharp diction.  And then ofcourse there is the climax that gives a  human face to the tragedy of September 11. Coming in the wake of the 7/11 blasts, Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota was a  timely film. And as Shah masterfully used TV footage of the WTC towers and panned closer to the image of a human figure falling from one of the floors, you realized that he did not want us to ever  forget the human stories buried under the rubble of bombed buildings and mangled trains.