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At first glance, this new crime thriller looks as if it will come off as an off-shoot of ‘Pataal Lok’: the same wide roads connecting central-south Delhi to East Delhi, with its narrow lanes and crowded flats, where dark things flourish.
It opens with a bunch of dead bodies, around which sensation-seeking YouTubers, and TRP hungry anchors, start gathering like flies. We’ve seen iterations of these scenes numerous times. The main character is a disgraced-policeman-with-a-drinking-problem. Again, so ubiquitous is this kind of figure — conflicted cops as the moral centre of their grimy universe — that I immediately felt like starting a petition to bring back the tradition of crystal-clean policemen assigned to investigate grime-and-crime.
But almost as soon as it begins, ‘Gaanth’ makes us count its singularities. The assembly of a crime scene stuns you into horrified speculation. What drastic secrets were hidden by the family — an older woman, grown sons and their wives, and a young boy — found hanging by their necks? Was it something to do with occult, or tantra-mantra? Was it group suicide ? Or was it, as the plot which winds itself through these roads of Jamuna Paar, a cunningly-disguised mass murder?
The eight part series, directed by Kanish Verma and created by Soham Bhattacharya, takes full advantage of our sharpened attention: not wanting to miss anything which may come out of this unusual start, we keep a close eye on the dramatis personae. Gadar Singh (Manav Vij), the policeman yanked out of his drunken stupor to unravel this bizarre case, is a dogged sort. Once he gets on the trail, it’s hard to deflect him, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing, as we discover a bit down the road.
Watch Gaanth Chapter 1 Jamuna Paar promo here:
The show also introduces us to another main character, whom we meet in the first episode itself. Medical intern Sakshi Murmu (Monika Panwar) has psychic powers which kick in at opportune moments, one of which arises when a boy, suffering from deep trauma, is admitted to her hospital. Sakshi’s caste identity comes in the way of acceptance by her ‘merit waley’ colleagues: only one, a senior, finds a sympathetic chord, especially when Sakshi finds a way to decode the drawings made by the boy.
As befits whodunits, red herrings crop up. One involving a worn-to-the-bone pair – a man and a woman — with links to the dead family, has disappeared. Gadar’s colleagues are hard on their heels. Meanwhile, a lady cop, Satyawati Mittal (Saloni Batra) has been attached to the case, and is busy making herself both seen and felt: some of the most effective parts of the series are their interactions, in which both he and she find themselves most switched on when they are on the job.
As reluctant neighbours come up with dark details of the family in question — how they kept to themselves, how no one was invited in, among other things — intrigue grows. A visit to the local ‘kabristan’ is thrown in: can there be something supernatural about the deaths?
But, and this is truly the case with so many web offerings which stretch across eight episodes of nearly 45 minutes each, things start getting repetitive, and interest begins ebbing. In many instances, the pace slows down to a crawl, which is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when you want a glance or a smile to register. Or even a body so badly mutilated that you can barely recognise it as one. Or a striking flashback, which reveals how Sakshi sees what mere mortals cannot. But the frisson is short-lived, with ‘Gaanth’ slumping back each time into Gadar and Mittal and company going around in circles.
A word of appreciation for Vij, who does a good job of being a middling cop, with no pretensions of being anything other than who he is, letting the drink swallow him before he finds enough strength to shake it off: here’s an actor who doesn’t have to ‘act’ as a Sardar, he knows it from the inside. In a lovely moment, at a press conference, he begins reading out a statement in English, fumbles over a word, and starts again, this time fluently, in Hindi. Panwar is solid, too, as is Batra. But by the time we leave them, still fumbling for answers, the script is fumbling too, to keep things going.
It does leave us on a cliff-hanger, so I have hopes that it will llive up to its dank promise in the next part. And I do hope it comes out fast, or it risks the danger of out of sight, out of mind.
Gaanth Chapter 1 Jamuna Paar cast: Manav Vij, Monika Panwar, Saloni Batra, Naved Aslam, Neha Iyer, Gopal Datt, Rajesh Tailang
Gaanth Chapter 1 Jamuna Paar review director: Kanishk Verma
Gaanth Chapter 1 Jamuna Paar rating: 2.5 stars
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