Saas Bahu Achaar Pvt Ltd is a well-proportioned study of the Disenfranchised

In the second episode of Zee5’s Saas Bahu Achaar Pvt Ltd Suman, played by Amruta Subhash visits an astrologist who tells her “Apki toh shani ki rekha hi nahi hai”. We’re never really told if that deduction implies good or bad because our protagonist cuts in without waiting for an explanation. “Mere mahadev yaa toh mere liye raste badal denge, yaa meri manzil badal denge”, Suman says before leaving mid-conversation. A mother who has been left to fend for herself, plans to take life by the scruff of the neck, in what is a familiar underdog story made unique by its familial context. Set in the by-lanes of old Delhi, the show seeks to flip conventional wisdoms of the saas-bahu world that have in our imagination and maybe even reality been preceded by controversy and suspicion. In Saas Bahu Achaar Pvt Ltd, nothing is really hidden or held back for effect. In fact, life plays out with the humbling pace of blocks stumbling back up into some sort of momentum.

Suman is a mother, separated from her husband Dilip, played by a terrific Anup Soni . By herself, Suman doesn’t have too many talents, nor the zest or enthusiasm to live loudly. It’s probably what has driven her husband into another woman’s arms. In one scene Suman is reminded by her elder daughter, rather crudely, that she is illiterate, a wanderer, a characteristic she dare not pass onto her children who ought to do better than her in life. Suman happens to have a supportive saas, the first of the many subversions of a genre we are all well aware of. She also has a talent for making good achaar, but none for selling it. This is where people around her come in.

Created by TVF, Saas Bahu Achaar Pvt Ltd isn’t exactly a Make in India PR campaign, nor a placeholder for feminism. It, in fact, queries the loneliness of the lower-middle classes through the mundanity of the things they must navigate as functional, responsible adults. The fact that the show is largely set during the Delhi winters, allows it to embody the worn aesthetic of Delhi’s working-class men and women. Subhash is impeccable, as a lonely woman who tackles everyday life with the insouciance of a woman who has come to terms with her place in the world. She shares camaraderie with men and women, alike, unaware of the many social anxieties that drive women like her into a corner. In one scene, she speaks to a widow about men ogling ‘women like her’ without the paranoia of someone who clings to her victimhood. It’s a quietly revelatory scene where Suman’s dissonance, at times her inability to feel burdened by her circumstances, becomes someone else’s agency.

The series is led by stellar performances, including Subhash and Soni. But it’s really Suman’s sidekick Shukla (Anandeshwar Dwivedi) who steals the series in a touching portrayal of middle-aged loneliness. Shukla is a 42-year-old man living away from home. He secretly sells goods inside buses – a model Suman eventually borrows from – and candidly talks about life, struggle and purpose. Shukla embodies an India we rarely see, the people who never made it, who spend their lives avoiding being swallowed by it whole. In Shukla’s dignity, his ability to wrench humanity out of the obscenest of circumstances, there is also tragedy. Of the men and women who never quite become families, who never quite live up to societal demands. Some of us are simply not built to last the trials of life. We can only survive them until we can’t. Rarely does the series get this dark overtly, but it alludes to a sobering aspect of middle-aged lives that we rarely acknowledge.

Saas Bahu Achaar Pvt Ltd, like most TVF creations is obviously also convenient. It looks past questions of sexuality and depravity, brushes off evil from the world, and grunts through its runtime with an austere mix of coming-of-age tropes and inexplicable restraint. It’s almost as if the winter becomes the show, dials everyone’s toxicity down and paves clear the streets of Delhi for a woman to usher in an entrepreneurial revolution. Things are rarely that simple, and yet there is something to take home here still.

The show is about a lonely woman’s unlikely entrepreneurial journey through allies and unlikely pillars of strength. But it is also about the loneliness of India’s forgotten people, the men and women who for one reason or the other never quite amounted to the titular fantasy most households grow up watching – of family, of togetherness. It’s the classic joint-family fantasy, that the show casually twists into a franchise of its own. A franchise supported by a different kind of grit, but eventuating in a form of stunning isolation. It’s both dramatic and dreary, uplifting and chilling.

The author writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Views expressed are personal.

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