Acclaimed actor Seema Pahwa’s directorial debut is bustling with colourful characters, acerbic humour and rancour. Ram Prasad Ki Tehrvi re...
Acclaimed actor Seema Pahwa’s directorial debut is bustling with colourful characters, acerbic humour and rancour. Ram Prasad Ki Tehrvi refers to the death rites of the patriarch of a Brahmin family in Lucknow. The sudden demise of Ram Prasad (Naseeruddin Shah) causes his two daughters, four sons and their children to return to their ancestral home. The occasion is sombre, their conduct anything but.
It’s a crowded house, filled with overlapping chatter, the endless clanking of tea cups and the opening of unhealed wounds and long-simmering resentments. The initial tears soon give way to grimaces as Ram Prasad’s descendants navigate their complicated feelings towards their departed father and their recently widowed mother Savitri (Supriya Pathak). It barely helps that by way of inheritance, Ram Prasad has saddled his brood with a huge debt.
Every character carries an axe that grinds away as well as injures the rest. Excuses for squabbles and barbs abound. The passive-aggressive question “When did you last meet our father” becomes a reliable way to test loyalty.
Three of the four brothers (Manoj Pahwa, Vinay Pathak and Ninad Kamat) are united in self-pity and divided by their specific problems. Their wives (Divya Jagdale, Deepika Amin, Sadiya Siddiqui) churn out meals and stir the...
