This Indian series is being sold as a story about a gay man falling for his straight best friend but honestly, at its heart, it's really about friendship and what friendship can look like when it gets complicated and messy and emotionally loaded. It's available on the YouTube channel of Last Leaf Pictures, seven episodes of about 30 minutes each. I had mixed feelings throughout and a big part of that comes down to how I felt about one of the lead characters, but more on that in a bit. Anshul and Kavith are the two men at the centre of everything. They first meet on a train heading to Delhi, both of them not really ready to go back to their hometowns. They get off midway, turn around and head back to Mumbai to give themselves one more shot at the life they want there. Anshul is an aspiring actor with a young son back in Delhi living with his grandmother. Kavith is gay, freshly out of yet another relationship, his 17th by his own count over the years. The two strike up this unusu...
Anshul and Kavith are the two men at the centre of everything. They first meet on a train heading to Delhi, both of them not really ready to go back to their hometowns. They get off midway, turn around and head back to Mumbai to give themselves one more shot at the life they want there. Anshul is an aspiring actor with a young son back in Delhi living with his grandmother. Kavith is gay, freshly out of yet another relationship, his 17th by his own count over the years. The two strike up this unusual friendship and since both are struggling financially they decide to become roommates. Over time they get genuinely close, leaning on each other emotionally and financially in a way that starts to feel like family. Anshul is warm and fair and treats everyone around him with the same openness. Kavith absolutely adores him, pampers him, dotes on his son, and looks at Anshul with this starry eyed devotion that Anshul enjoys receiving. But Kavith is deeply needy when it comes to love. For him it's never about anything physical, it's all about the heart, and so it's not really a surprise when he eventually falls hard for Anshul and tells him. Anshul doesn't quite know how to handle it at first and things get awkward, but Kavith makes it clear he isn't asking for anything physical and somehow their friendship survives it. Other people drift in and out, Kavith's homophobic brother, a girl Anshul briefly dates who sends Kavith into a spiral of jealousy. Kavith starts to blur the line between friendship and relationship in his own head, to the point where he actually starts referring to Anshul as his boyfriend. Anshul tries to correct this but gives up too quickly. When Anshul gets serious enough about the girl to propose marriage, it devastates Kavith. The kind of love he wanted was never going to come and deep down he had been living on hope that wasn't really there.
The production is solid, the acting works, and nothing about it feels cheap or amateur. My problem is purely with the story. This whole friendship is built on a bed of illusions and misconceptions and someone is clearly pulling strings. Kavith as a character just doesn't feel real to me. The man has fallen in love 17 times and the last guy he was ready to abandon the city for, he had known for all of three weeks. The red flags are everywhere with him. He's needy, clingy, almost entirely focused on himself, and doesn't really stop to think about what the other person is feeling or going through. I also think he's pretty good at emotional manipulation, even if I don't think the writers meant for him to come across that way. That's just honestly how it landed for me. And then on top of all that, falling suddenly and completely into a one sided love with a committed straight man is just a lot. He also has this desperate need to be loved back without ever really sitting with the possibility that maybe the other person simply doesn't want that with him. Anshul is no angel either though. He's clearly enjoying having someone who adores him and finally feeling that closeness. But hiding the girlfriend from Kavith for as long as he did and never really putting his foot down firmly enough about where the line is, that's hard to excuse. He had to have known, or at the very least felt, that Kavith was getting in deeper and deeper emotionally. It was right there in front of him. And logically speaking, when a gay man is in an unrequited love with a straight man and they're living this closely together, it never ends well. No matter how much any of us might want to believe otherwise.
For me this show is really a bromance, a relationship that doesn't have a proper name for it. Can two people be soulmates through friendship? Yes absolutely, but that's a whole different thing from what's happening here. They do accept each other and that part is lovely, but Kavith is red flags from start to finish. He keeps saying he doesn't expect anything from Anshul but that's simply not true, he craves attention constantly. Giving up on physical love doesn't make him entitled to Anshul's heart either. And the reality is that there is nothing but pain ahead, deep pain, not just for Kavith but for Anshul too, if they stay in each other's lives the way this story has set things up. We all know that even if nobody in the show wants to say it. There's talk of a second season but I genuinely don't know where it goes from here. Anshul can't and really shouldn't suddenly discover he's gay, that would be absurd. And Kavith continuing to live with him would just be cruel to himself. Should they both go find someone else? Maybe that's the only way out. For now it was worth watching but it left too many things that are hard to look past. (5.5/10)
Comments