Bejoy Nambiar’s Taish is a slick tragedy that follows the unfortunate trajectory of a group of Colaba crossfit bros who find themselves in a face-off against Noida #gymfreaks and how their lives’ challenges blow up from stepping past horse excreta at Mahalaxmi Race Course to being stuck on the DND Flyway.
Wait, not really.
But Nambiar’s film has the emotional resonance of an Uber ghosting you the moment they hear Noida, thereby making it seem like a stylish exploration of… nothing.
Taish, (which, according to Google, means ‘anger’), opens with Jim Sarbh labouring through his Hindi dialogues like they are office-hour Tulsi Pipe Road traffic. This is somewhat understandable—he plays Rohan, a doctor brought up in the UK. However, everyone around him — friends, family, partner — seem to have missed the ‘main thodi thodi Hindi bolta’ bus despite having similar histories, making you wonder if Rohan distorted his language deliberately so that Navika Kumar could never figure out anything he was saying. For example, ‘maal hai kya’ in Rohanese would be ‘mall hair care’. See?
Anyway, so Rohan and his gang are one half of the Taish story. The other half is Pali (Harshvardhan Rane) and his gang of Punjabi mafia in London. Pali has the kind of personality where you half-expect him to stop in the middle of a chore to take a bicep selfie. He is the protégé of Kuli, a perpetually disgruntled older man who has forced Pali’s girlfriend to marry him. Now Pali is understandably upset and goes around disrupting Kuli’s businesses and casting that far-away, disheartened look that male models have while modelling distressed denims.
At a party for Rohan’s brother’s marriage, Kuli is invited and Rohan goes into shock. It is later revealed that Kuli sexually abused Rohan when he was 10 years old. It is a rare moment in Hindi cinema where the makers try to explore the trauma of sexual abuse among men, a subject never brought up in the woman-victim-saved-by-muscular-man scheme of Bollywood. Though there is no template to how survivors of abuse respond to victims and trauma manifests in various ways, Rohan’s response to seeing his abuser — having a meltdown in private, but staying away from his line of sight — feels familiar.
For this brief moment, Taish seemed like it was headed in a direction few Hindi films dare to take. But unfortunately, that was just what the moment was — brief. Rohan’s friend Sunny (Pulkit Samrat)—who rides in with a bike cavalcade to the wedding, flaunts his six-pack, gets into drunken brawls, and is basically the prototype of a man Bollywood sees as a ‘hero’ — decides to avenge his friend in the most ‘Sun-nee’ way possible. Oh, and he also admits that his thirst for revenge was also fuelled by an incident of assault on his sister he had witnessed as a child. (Err, okay.)
The rest of Taish almost forgets the sexual assault survivor in the middle of it, and turns into a revenge drama between the men. There’s gratuitous gore, lots of yelling and shattering of glass facades with bare fists and very videshi jail brawls. Not the desi fights where a fellow with a large gash on histhe cheek comes and topples your aluminium plate of dal-chawal as his cronies do a loud ‘ha ha ha’, but where men in tattoos and cornrows, irrespective of ethnicity, slash each other with knives.
The women in Taish — and there are quite a few of them — basically exist to look tortured and pretty when the noir frames have had too much gore. They appear like portrait-mode models, backgrounds blurred, skin glowing and smiles stretching across their faces at the pace at which government websites load on 3G. Sanjida Sheikh, who plays Pali’s girlfriend and is married to Kuli, only gets to cry and occasionally look startled like she has run out of toothpaste in the morning.
Kriti Kharbanda, who plays Rohan’s Pakistani girlfriend Arfa, initially shows promise — she stands up for herself and is also Rohan’s confidante and support system to deal with the trauma of abuse—but kind of gets chucked out of the script towards the end like paneer from a self-respecting pizza. In fact, towards the end of the film, Rohan says, “We must get Arfa and didi to safety and then do something about this.” This is right after Arfa has literally saved their lives by whacking a gun-toting thug with a glass tumbler. I’d trust that woman — who also happens to be a surgeon — with my life, but nope, not men in a Bollywood film.
The climax of the film, therefore, is bathed in the angst of angry men. Phew.
While I find it difficult to stomach graphic violence on screen, it has been essential to Nambiar’s style. In films such as Shaitaan and David, violence has also been a tool to tell the story of a character. In Taish, however, the slow romance with gore feels a little forced — I mean, I’d know what a gangster does even if you did not show his cronies nailing the hands of an extra to a chair. Curiously, in a few initial sections of the film, Sarbh’s character says some of the most sensitive lines in the film. He tries explaining to his friend how, by trying to avenge him, Sunny has deprived him of his right to deal with his trauma his own way. He also says that violence is unnecessary. So thankfully, Nambiar’s film doesn’t end up glorifying violence unapologetically as a means to avenge sexual assault — his stand, at best, is ambiguous.
However, one wishes Taish wasn’t so taken in by style that it lost sight of reality the same way 5-ways-to-wear-kitchen-towels-as-clothes type videos do. Because, one, why would you need to wear a kitchen towel? And secondly, why would you need to wear a kitchen towel? An example from Taish: Pali technically goes to jail, but looks like he was shooting for an episode of Extreme Makeover. He emerges with his hair in cornrows, and gets a key tattooed under one eye and an ECG graph under another because… ? I this this style obsession is what dragged Taish away from exploring the consequences of child sexual abuse the way it had started off—with empathy.
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