Shadow Play:
A small police station in serene Panchgani. Not much crime except maybe theft. Then a man walks in claiming his wife is missing. It does not seem possible, muses the cop on duty, that in a town where nothing much happens, that a woman disappears. So idle is the inspector, that he has a side hustle as a crime novelist.
Khoj- Parchaiyon Ke Uss Paar (on ZEE5) is too pretentious a title for the far-fetched, lightweight thriller that follows. Ved Khanna (Sharib Hashmi), a lawyer, files a complaint about his missing wife, Meera. A laidback Inspector Amol Sathe (Aamir Dalvi) believes she will turn up, it’s hardly a crime worth investigating. A few days later, Meera (Anupriya Goenka) has returned, but Ved claims she is not his wife. All the photos in the house are of this woman, her sister (Kriti Garg) and even her dog recognize her as Meera, her social media posts have her picture, but Ved insists she is an imposter.
Written by Ajay Deep Singh and directed by Prabal Baruah, this is the kind of old-style plot that would perhaps be okay for a film. Stretched over seven episodes, even short 24-minute ones, it snaps rather fast. And there are scenes that look like padding—like Ved sneaking his daughter (Ebadat Hussain) out of boarding school so that she can prove the woman is not her mother, when a video call would suffice!
In today’s connected age, it is practically impossible to replace someone, unless it is by a lookalike—and even then, there are biometrics stored in so many places. A photo album can be fudged, but there are, say, college friends, and relatives, all of whom cannot be coached to go along with a fictional scenario. Meera who supposedly works for a local NGO, is suddenly at home, all made-up and dressed-up, cooking meals for him.
The more desperate Ved gets to find out what happened to his wife, the more he slips, because all his proofs prove ineffectual. The Inspector, with a skeptical look on his face, goes along with whatever Ved requests—to the extent that he opens the door of his home for the man. Only in a small town could an inspector be so accommodating. The hint that the cop is a crime writer, and the end credits give the game away, while the show introduces a mental health issue. Is it possible that the mentaly ill Ved is playing out a strange kind of paranoia? But the narrative and the look of the show is too flat for such an eventuality. It concentrates mainly on Ved trying to unmask the imposter. And looking back after watching the rather predictable climax, there is no reason for Ved to have hired a weird private detective (Ravi Kant Sinha) to hunt for his wife.
Sharib Hashmi looks suitably harried, Anupriya Goenka looks too nonchalant for a woman whose husband could be losing his mind. It is left to Aamir Dalvi to lend the bland show some spice, in the role of a cop who’d rather be a writer. So everything that happens is a new plot for him—it is pulpy enough for a railway station book stall bestseller.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
