The Space Between Us
—On 41 Years of Saaransh

It was a Sunday.
The kind of Sunday where the silence holds more than it says.
High noon was approaching when the phone rang.

It was Anupam.
There was sleep in his voice—
the kind that clings after a long journey,
when your body returns home but your spirit is still catching up.

He said—
he said, “Bhatt saab, today Saaransh turns 41.”

And just like that,
I was pulled back.

He had just returned from Cannes,
where his film Tanvi the Great had moved strangers to tears.
It had stirred something—real, raw, undeniable—
in the hearts of people who didn’t even know the language
but understood the feeling.
That’s how I knew.
I knew it came from the same place.

Because there is a space in the human heart—
fragile, trembling, undefeated—
from which only a few things are ever born:
a real prayer, a real tear, a real story.

That was the space Saaransh came from.
And that is the space Tanvi the Great now rises out of.

Back then, in 1984, I had a 28-year-old actor
playing a man more than twice his age—
B. V. Pradhan,
a father who had lost everything but his dignity.
Anupam carried that grief like it was his own.
That’s how we made Saaransh.
Not with technique.
But with surrender.

And now, after all these years,
he has created Tanvi the Great—
a deeply personal film,
inspired by his autistic niece, Tanvi.

But here’s the miracle:
Tanvi in the film is played not by a known face,
but by a first-time actor—Shubhangi Dutt.
A complete unknown.
And yet, when I watched her on screen,
I saw the birth of something extraordinary.

She plays a girl with impossible dreams,
the kind the world loves to laugh at.
But she dares to chase them.
And something inside you—quietly, helplessly—
starts chasing too.

There’s an old Jewish saying:
What you teach your children, you teach your grandchildren.

That’s what I felt, sitting in Anupam’s edit room—
like a circle had completed itself.
Like something we began decades ago with Saaransh
had found new breath in Tanvi.

These films, they don’t belong to us.
They belong to the human race.
They are not trophies.
They are lifelines.

They live not in museums,
but in people—
in their wounds, in their hopes, in their quiet hours of doubt.

Anupam is almost 70 now.
The same age as B. V. Pradhan.
That’s time’s strange kindness—
how it brings us back to ourselves.

And 41 years from now,
I know someone will remember Tanvi the Great
the way they remember Saaransh today.
Not because it made headlines,
but because it made someone feel less alone.

That’s all we ever hoped to do.
And sometimes, if the film god is kind,
that’s exactly what a film does.

Authored by Mahesh Bhatt!

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