By Nikita Agarwal

The final moment in Sumit Aroraa’s new short film White Shirt is incredibly calming. Vani (Kritika Kamra) walks down a road in a red dress that matches her lipstick, putting on earphones. We don’t know if she’s really going to meet someone for dinner, or if she’s just walking back home. She is smiling very slightly. I like to think she’s walking back home.

White Shirt is the story of the end of a relationship. It’s also the story of a white shirt. Avik (Kunaal Kapoor) leaves it behind in Vani’s house when she asks him to move out after she finds out that he has cheated on her again. Avik uses the shirt as an excuse to keep calling Vani — when she’s in her office, when she’s at home, when she’s on her way home from work — to fix a time when he will come pick it up. He never does. Meanwhile, Vani hangs it on the curtain rod in her living room. Sometimes she sleeps in it (this just annoys me), but she refuses to ever wash it.

Each scene in the short film looks like it has been carefully shot. But the biggest problem is that each of the shots and dialogues never allow you to dislike Avik, even if you want to. In its attempt to tell the story beautifully, to show us that sometimes relationships aren’t really easy to let go of, Aroraa seems to go easy on Avik, letting him keep using the shirt as an excuse to call Vani again and again. By the end of it you are so irritated, because you want to tell him that this isn’t lovely, and it isn’t sweet, even if it might seem real. Some part of you even wonders uncomfortably if Avik knows that Vani will keep picking up his call. But you still wait to watch the film until the end, because you want to know what Vani does.

Perhaps Vani should have just thrown the white shirt out of her house as my colleague thinks she should have. Then there would be no short film, even though that would be a suitably satisfying end to all of Avik’s drama. But when Vani walks down the road with her earphones, free of the shirt, it is still as satisfying, because there’s the sense of the end of not just the complicated relationship but also the unexplainable feeling that sometimes makes you keep listening to an ex when a relationship ends. It’s still the beginning of something else, whatever it may be, for Vani.