Sharvari and Vedang's chemistry in Maskara is exactly the kind of young love song Bollywood needed right now

Okay so Main Vaapas Aaunga dropped its second song today and Maskara is the kind of track that does not hit you immediately. You put it on, it feels pleasant, breezy even, and then about two minutes in you realise you have not looked at your phone once and something about it has quietly gotten under your skin. That is not an accident. That is what happens when Imtiaz Ali is building the world, Irshad Kamil is writing the words, and AR Rahman is deciding what everything sounds like.

The teaser for Main Vaapas Aaunga had already gotten people interested. The first track had done its job. Maskara is the one though that tells you what kind of film this actually is going to be. Not loud. Not trying too hard. Just very, very sure of itself.

The song is doing two things at once and that is the whole point

Sharvari's character Jiya is having a whole moment in this song. She is giddy and bold and dancing through feelings she has not quite admitted to herself yet. There is this energy she has where everything is a bit of a joke, a bit of a game, because if you treat it like that then it is not scary. Anyone who has ever had a crush they were not ready to take seriously will recognise that immediately.

And then there is Vedang's Keenu, who is doing the complete opposite. Still. Quietly paying attention. He already knows what she is hiding and he is not rushing her. That gap between what she is performing and what he is actually seeing is where the song lives, and it is a genuinely interesting place for a love song to set up camp. Most songs about young love are either all butterflies or all heartbreak. Maskara is sitting in that weird middle space where nothing has happened yet but everything has already changed, and that is a much harder thing to write and pull off.

Vedang Raina singing for his own character was a real swing and it landed

This is the detail that keeps coming back. Vedang actually sang for Keenu in this song, alongside Nilanjana Ghosh. And look, actors singing for their own characters is either going to be the thing that makes a song or the thing that slightly derails it. Here it genuinely works. His voice has this quality that sounds like someone being careful with something fragile, which is exactly what Keenu is doing throughout the song.

Nilanjana Ghosh handles Jiya's side and she is doing something quite precise with it. The vocals are light and almost playful on the surface but there is actual feeling sitting just underneath that, which again, is the character to a tee. The fact that both performances are calibrated this specifically to who these people are in the story makes Maskara feel less like a song inserted into a film and more like a scene that happens to have music in it.

Recording with AR Rahman apparently does that to people. Both singers have spoken about what that experience was like and the short version seems to be that he has a way of getting you to go somewhere emotionally that you did not know you could reach. Whether or not that is always true, you can hear something in this track that sounds less like a polished studio product and more like two people genuinely inside a moment.

What this means for the film and why June 12 suddenly feels far away

Main Vaapas Aaunga has Diljit Dosanjh, Naseeruddin Shah, Sharvari and Vedang all in the same film. That cast alone is enough to make people pay attention. But what Maskara is doing is something the cast alone could not do, which is tell you the emotional frequency the whole thing is operating on.

This is an Imtiaz Ali film so you already knew it was going to be about longing in some shape or form. What Maskara confirms is that it is specifically about the kind of longing that lives before anything is said out loud. That very particular, very specific ache of a feeling that has not been named yet. He has been here before with his best work and audiences have always responded to it. If the rest of the soundtrack holds up to what Maskara is doing, June 12 is going to be a good day at the movies.