There’s a scene in the second episode of Vinay Waikul’s eight-episode series Aranyak where one its two protagonists, police officer Kasturi Dogra (Raveena Tandon) decides to cancel her sanctioned leave from service for a year to devote herself to her family and children, and join an investigation into the murder of a young French teenager—the kind of challenging case she has been waiting for. She lives and works at a fictional hill town, Sironah, nestled among dense pinewood forests. When she is back at work after just a day at home doing things she is no good at, like cooking, her boss asks her, referring to the officer Angad Malik (Parambrata Chatterjee) who had joined the Sironah police station to replace her for the year: “So you agree that Angad will lead the investigation and you both will work as a team?” There’s a quiet confidence in the way Kasturi braces herself and replies, “We’ll see.”
It is unclear why the police station decides to let Angad stay despite Kasturi coming back, but we know that we are in for a procedural with tremendous promise.
We know in that moment when she joins Angad for the investigation that Kasturi knows better than anyone else, the murky and often comic fault lines of Sironah. She would know its hiding places, trouble spots and vulnerabilities. Soon enough, we realise that Kasturi’s job is also a crutch and a coping mechanism for her estrangement with her husband, an internet café owner. Her desperation to solve this case co-exists with her hope that if she succeeds, it may correct the other parts of her life, including the marriage to a wounded man festering in an abyss of lost masculinity.
In the beginning, the way Kasturi’s life unfolds, and the way she goes about her business—resolute and bristly but prone to be derailed by personal bias because she is intimately connected to her community—reminded me a lot of Mare in Mare of Easttown (HBO), but I resisted comparisons.
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By the end of the third episode, Kasturi, Angad and the looming forests of Sironah had sucked me in.
Political power play, drug trafficking, personal secrets and a mysterious creature called “nartendu” (half leopard, half man) fuel murders that Kasturi and Angad investigate in this bleak, absorbing and sharply-detailed mystery thriller about two beleaguered police officers. Angad has a history of personal loss and grief which he effectively hides in his professional avatar. Kasturi’s motherhood is central to her policing. She is not an ideal detective or mom. But both characters have something more compelling than perfection or conventional heroism going for them: they’re real, at least in their outlines. It’s a pity that this is all we get to know about these two characters set up with fascinating premises. Charudutt Acharya’s tight screenplay anchors itself more on plot, milieu and suspense, and ultimately the characters of Kasturi and Angad don’t go beyond the basic outlines. The possibility of knowing their inner worlds is enticing, but there are no satisfactory character graphs for them.
The investigation leads them to a local politician and his bureaucrat cronies, a shopkeeper and his wife, a family of French expats, drug peddlers, spoilt brats of the town’s powers-that-be—all clues to demystifying the “nartendu” and find the killer who has wreaked havoc in Sironah. We are informed that a spate of similar killings, the supposed serial killer leaving the same marks on the necks of victims, took place here 19 years ago.
In tone, treatment, texture and characterisation, Aranyak is firmly in the tradition of atmospheric noir thrillers, which we have been seeing an abundance of since streaming has opened up to diverse genres of storytelling in the last decade or so. Both Kasturi and Angad have shades of police officers we have seen in fiction—be it Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus, Martin Beck by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Brad Inglesby’s Mare Sheehan, or closer home, Anita Nair’s Inspector Gowda.
Beyond the obvious similarities, character isn’t as important for director Vinay Waikul (who also directed Alt/Balaji’s police drama series The Test Case) as plotting and creating suspense to unlock the mysteries.
The hints at Angad’s personal tragedy from his past build up a momentum to his character, but till almost the end, we see a man utterly in control of himself. Angad is textbook serious and meticulous. He mocks at the supernatural and glorifies logic and rationality and even believes it is high time the police force stopped using physical brutality during investigations. His emotions are constantly in check.
Unlike him, Kasturi is volatile and goes by instinct rather than logic. In this pair, a classic man-woman trope—man gifted with clinical rationality, and woman more invested in emotion and gut feeling; left-brained and right-brained, as it were—gets new life. It’s obvious from the first two episodes that a big part of Angad’s deep-dive into this case could be the need for revenge for a tragedy from his past.
Chatterjee’s acting has a restrained monotone pallor—there are hardly any clues to his inner world, and how his past misfortune has changed him or wrecked him until towards the end when we see sliver of emotion rising up only to be reigned in; a self-destructive past of addiction also gets mentioned.
Tandon is quite the revelation. She has matured as an actor—there’s a finely accomplished subtlety in her performance, rooted in tiny resonant shifts of voice, expression, gestures and the local tongue. Ashutosh Rana as Kasturi’s former mentor in the police force as well as her father-in-law delivers a powerful performance steeped in a wisdom and intuition that co-exists with his weakening memory powers.
One of the most fascinating characters in the series is that of Kasturi’s husband who runs an internet café, played effectively by Vivek Madaan. He is at war with his own demons—a man embittered by the success and passion of his wife, on the one hand, and constant mocked by his father on the other. Like most new series coming out of India, the teenagers and young adults are half-baked characters. There are a few characters with the potential of being richly layered, struggling with pressures of identity and success, but none of them comes alive or has a graph that allows peeks into their turmoils and triggers.
The Aranyak narrative finds darkness at every turn, with a slow-burn tempo in the first few episodes, leading up to the climax of the two final episodes in which too much happens simultaneously. Technically, every aspect of the show, including music, editing and cinematography, sync in. The landscape visuals are appropriately gloomy, grey skies looming over forests and pretty hill town architecture—which cinematographer Saurabh Goswami competently captures.
In a really good mystery; the journey matters the most. The scenery, and most importantly, the people: the detective, the bystanders, the suspects, some of whom will eventually turn out not to be the killer. Aranyak makes this journey worthwhile. If only the two characters at its centre revealed themselves to be more compelling as human beings, beyond the call of duty and courage.
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