How Mai on Netflix serves as an exploration of the mother's guilt

When I interviewed the makers of _Mai_, the new Netflix India show starring Sakshi Tanwar, and asked them how it will add to the discourse around motherhood that the streaming platform is shaping with shows like _The Fame Game_ , they clarified that the gender of the titular character is incidental. “It could have very well been the father.” But watching the show, one realises why only a mother could have seen the story through. Logically, like Sujoy Ghosh’s revenge thriller _Kahaani_ (2012), a woman is not seen as a threat. Like Vidya Balan used fake pregnancy as a cover, Tanwar’s character in Mai wears her domesticated Bhartiya Nari appearance as an armour. But most importantly, emotionally, it’s the mother’s guilt that’s weaponized here. Tanwar’s character Sheel sources her ammunition from the guilt of abandonment. The guilt allows her to almost sleepwalk her way through injuring, abducting, and killing people if they come in the way of her finding out how her daughter died. Unlike another mother, Sushmita Sen’s titular character in Ram Madhvani’s  _Aarya,_ it doesn’t take two seasons for Sheel to kill someone in order to “protect my family.” All it takes is an episode. While the first one can be ruled as a homicide instead of a calculated murder, she shows little guilt in disposing the body and moving on to the next target. And she is no serial killer: her lack of prudence leads to her act being captured on CCTV cameras. But the gnawing guilt that comes with such a tragedy, like say what Vidya Balan ’s character experiences in Suresh Triveni’s _Jalsa_  (2022), is absent here, or is eclipsed by the mother’s guilt, that — sorry for the gender swapping — is the baap of all guilts. [caption id=“attachment_10560921” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Vidya Balan in Jalsa[/caption] It’s interesting to juxtapose the mother in Jalsa against the mother in Mai. Balan’s character subconsciously wants to confess or be exposed but it’s the working mother’s guilt, of abandoning her son with cerebral palsy, that prevents her from doing the right thing. On the other hand, it’s the mother’s guilt in Mai that allows her to brush her crime under the carpet and advance to the next one because she has a larger goal to fulfill. Like Balan’s profession of an altruistic journalist nudges her to confess, Sheel’s profession of a nurse may equip her with the clinical detachment required while dealing with deaths, a la Dexter . But the very essence of being a nurse at an old age home is nurturing. For someone who believes in nursing the wounds to inflict them without a hint of remorse must stem from a far more deep-seated emotion, as opposed to just an occupational hazard. Here, the mother’s guilt gets amplified because the daughter in question lived with speech disability. In case of children living with disability, the parents tend to be more perceptive, protective, and insecure. But there was always a disconnect between the two that kept feeding the monster of guilt that Sheel would carry with her after her daughter’s death. What was the reason behind this gap between the mother and the daughter? Was it the disability? In the Oscar-winning Apple TV film _CODA_, the deaf mother tells her hearing daughter that she wished if the latter was also deaf then they would be able to understand each other better. But that didn’t seem to be the primary reason behind the lack of communication between Sheel and her daughter as one would assume the mother also possessed endless empathy owing to her profession of looking after the elderly, one of whom is battling dementia and the other seeking euthanasia. [caption id=“attachment_9883751” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Still from CODA[/caption] Or was the reason resistance to deaf culture? In Kayoze Irani’s short film Ankahi from Dharmatic’s _Ajeeb Daastaans_ anthology last year, Shefali Shah’s character urges her husband (Tota Roy Chowdhury) to learn the sign language to communicate with their deaf daughter. But he’s busy looking for a cure to her deafness instead of accepting the now. Similarly in Mai, what plays out in the later episodes tells us that Sheel, and not the father Yash, is the one communicating with their daughter. But still, the daughter confides about her relationship in her father. That gives out the reason behind the cracks in the mother-daughter relationship: a generation and culture gap. As mostly a homemaker, or otherwise around far older people, Sheel doesn’t have the broadmindedness that her daughter expects from her. She’s also the ideal devrani who chides her daughter for not listening to her taiji. And she’s also the one who’s shocked to know her daughter was dating a Muslim man.

So when her daughter dies, and she slowly begins to unravel the cause, and in turn discover more about her daughter’s life, the guilt of not knowing her enough keeps fuelling her relentless rage that makes her pivot to a 360 from the ideal homemaker she was made out to be. The blinkers in her quest also cause discord in her family, particularly with her husband. Like Shonali Bose’s _The Sky Is Pink_  (2019), the parents have polar opposite mechanisms to deal with the death of their daughter. Like Farhan Akhtar’s character in that film, the father here wants to distract himself from the loss whereas like Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ character, Sheel wants the memory of their daughter to persevere. As her husband interrupts her attempt to uncover the reason behind their daughter’s loss because she isn’t present for her post-death ritual, she retorts sharply, “Pooja karne se meri beti ko shanti nahi milegi. Aapko milti hogi.” *Spoilers below* The guilt is compounded by her family dynamics. Her husband had made her give away their second child, a son, to his brother and bhabhi because they were more financially sound to raise him.

When her daughter dies, the pain of being a surrogate mother, of letting go of her son years ago, comes back to bite her.

When her husband scolds her for claiming another child because she lost hers, she screams back in ache, desperation, and ownership, “He’s our son, not someone else’s.” When she misses the physical presence of both her children, she goes on to adopt another. Well, not really adopt, but abduct. She keeps Keshav, a suspect in her daughter’s death, hostage. She argues with her co-conspirators for him to be kept alive. “He’s even younger than my daughter. I’ll make him realise what he’s doing is wrong.” In trying to rehabilitate Keshav, Sheel is seeking her own redemption as a mother.

She nurses his wounds, including the ones she inflicts on him. She can’t help being rough with him because her soft corner for Keshav often stands in the way of solving her daughter’s mysterious death. He doesn’t reciprocate the concern at all because he is of a different bloodline and has had a difficult childhood. As he tells her in one scene, “All these relationships are only for privileged people like you.” In the end, when he threatens to kill her surrogate son, she has no option but to stab him to death. A mother saves her surrogate son, but loses the adopted one. When she slides Keshav’s body under the bed she shares with her husband, that visual is symbolic of a wife hiding the skeletons of a mother in the closet. And as we witness in the climax of Season 1, the skeletons come tumbling out as she discovers she still hasn’t avenged her daughter’s death since the mastermind is still on the loose.

Season 2 will determine the extent and magnitude of the mother’s guilt. Will she go all MOM (2017)and go avenging her daughter or will she learn to live with the guilt? Because redemption for one guilt will only beget more guilt. Mai is streaming on Netflix India. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.