With lights flashing as they idle towards the scene of a domestic dispute, the police inspector Hathiram Chaudhary explains to his junior office Imran how the world works. As in Hindu cosmology, our world consists of three parts: heaven and earth, and then there is the paatal lok.
According to Chaudhary (Jaideep Ahlawat), for an aspiring police officer heaven and the paatal lok are kinds of purgatory. Once you’ve landed in heaven you tend to stay put, sheltered from the conflicts of wider society, while the underworld for the most part remains mired in murk. For an officer to rise in rank, some of the denizens of the underworld must crawl roach-like out of their holes and disrupt life among the earth-dwelling middle classes. That upsets the balance of things, prompting public scandal and the opportunity for clout.
In Hinduism however Patala is multilayered. The Vishnu Purana and Bhagavata Purana describe its seven strata as more beautiful than heaven itself. Filled with glistening lakes and brilliant jewels, the underworld is a site of luxury and temptation, governed by impish demons and deities who might just as well lend a helping hand as prove up to no good. A realm of pure consciousness, at its best Patala might serve as a source of strength and inspiration, while at its worst it is no more than a slippery slope.
Four youths gather at a hotel, quarrel with the concierge over their bill, then at the end of a high-speed chase find themselves surrounded by gunmen on the Yamuna Bridge in Delhi. Tope Singh (Jagjeet Sandhu), the apparent ringleader of the group, hops over the hoods of cars before tossing in a final show of insolence a yellow phone into the river. The gunmen who have surrounded the group turn out to be from Delhi police headquarters. Chaudhary arrives on the scene as the local officer with jurisdiction over this eastern district.
The Delhi police are not particularly forthcoming over the details of the case, and at the same time they seem eager to foist the investigation onto Choudhary, who lacks the support of his superior. Via an anonymous tip, the four youths stand accused of conspiracy to murder. Quickly someone leaks the intended target to the press: Sanjeev Mehra (Neeraj Kabi), a prominent journalist with a reputation for exposing corrupt politicians and other dodgy business practices.
Out on the street in front of the news headquarters or outside the gates of his home, Sanjeev can expect to be jostled and interrogated by a throng of reporters. After bickering with his wife who suffers from anxiety attacks, he heads to an upscale bar where he can expect to be left to his own devices. Instead he runs into a junior colleague from the office, the aspiring Cornell-educated investigative reporter Sara Matthews (Niharika Lyra Dutt). Sanjeev says that serious journalists in India used to be revered, then something about the country changed, and now they can expect to be trolled, killed, or worse still fired.
Already Paatal Lok, the Indian crime thriller created by Sudip Sharma and directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy, boasts an intoxicating blend of elements. There are the moody atmospherics and newspaper politics surrounding the journalist Sanjeev, whose personal life and work life seem emblematic of a faded lustre. And the grit and grime and some of the societal issues hinted at through the lens of the criminal underworld are neatly offset by the buddy cop dynamics between Chaudhary and his studious junior officer Imran Ansari (Ishwak Singh).
‘Bridges’, the first episode of the series produced by Anushka Sharma and aired exclusive to Amazon Prime, seamlessly introduces its core cast and a sense of deepening mystery. There is a brisk pace to the opening chase sequence, then the rest of the episode revels in small character moments. Chaudhary admits that he learned his cosmology via WhatsApp, and like the inspector himself, we must grow accustomed to one key term: in Paatal Lok the investigation will proceed on a need-to-know basis.
Chaudhary has his own problems at home. His son gets bad grades and wants to switch schools, while his wife punctures his sense of pride as he explains his important new case by immediately presuming that he has received a promotion. After meeting with Sanjeev, Chaudhary is back home when he receives a late telephone call from the office. The criminal records for the four suspects have arrived by fax.
Tope Singh, the slick headband-wearing mouthpiece of the group, has only a string of minor offences to his name, like car and motorbike robberies. But Vishal Tyagi (Abhishek Banerjee), the group member with a cut-off thumb, who withheld his name and seemed like the grunt of the pack, turns out to have a more chequered history. From Chitrakoot in Uttar Pradesh, he is a notorious gangster responsible for a litany of bloody crimes, and this is his first time in police custody.
