Chumbak is silly, loud, chaotic and genuinely funny in bits, discovers Deepa Gahlot.
IMAGE: The cast of Chumbak.
Key Points
- Chumbak is a sitcom set in a Mumbai colony where five families constantly interfere in each other’s lives, reminiscent of older, chaotic Indian comedies.
- The show features a large ensemble cast, including Neena Gupta and Deven Bhojani as an older couple dealing with early-onset dementia, which is portrayed with questionable levity.
- Characters like Dharmendra, an actor in drag, and Twinkle, a dimwitted model, contribute to the show’s over-the-top and farcical humour.
A colony of lavish row houses in Chembur, a suburb in north east Mumbai, is aptly named Chumbak, which is the title of this sitcom in which the characters stick to one another like metal to magnet.
The concept of privacy is alien to these five couples and their families. Everybody is constantly in each other’s homes, minding their business. The characters have notional careers, but most of the time, they are parked together — the women gossiping, the men playing pool, drinking and, yes, gossiping.
Meet the Chumbak Colony Residents
The oldest couple is Rajni and Kuku Merchant (Neena Gupta, Deven Bhojani), whose only son lives in the US, so she is dependent on the neighbours every time there is a problem — and there are plenty, since Kuku suffers from early onset dementia.
Later in the series, Rajni gets fed up of being her husband’s nursemaid and wants to divorce him.
‘About time I live for myself,’ she keeps saying, as she deals with daily hassles.
But since divorce is still not acceptable in Indian sitcoms, she wants to continue living with him, feeding and cleaning him.
It baffles the judge, whose name plate reads M T Bhejawala!
Rajni sounds frazzled, but is always dressed in stylish saris (she is supposedly a sari designer) and jewellery, with her long hair left loose. It never occurs to them to hire help!
Looking after a person with dementia is difficult and distressing, so writer-director Aatish Kapadia (who has also created it with J D Majethia), making it look like a cute quirk just doesn’t seem right.
Nod to Classic Indian Sitcoms
Chumbak belongs to the Sarabhai vs Sarabhai and Khichdi brand of sitcom, produced by the same team. It’s silly, loud, chaotic and genuinely funny in bits.
After the relative sophistication of the TVF kind of comedies (Panchayat, Gullak), a show like Chumbak harks back to the days of the over-the-top Doordarshan sitcom. (A daft character, for instance, is accompanied by the sound of a donkey braying.)
The story of Chumbak Colony is introduced by Hutoxi (Amyra Dastur), who has written a book about it and is reading from it at a launch event. Her husband, Freddy (Anant Vijay Joshi) is a chef, under the thumb of his overbearing mother Gulshan (Delnaaz Irani), and often caught in the crossfire of their constant bickering.
Other characters in Chumbak have their own quirks — Dharmendra (Sumeet Raghavan) is an actor, who appears in a television show in drag, so is always in elaborate female garb, which his flight attendant wife Kiran (Sandeepa Dhar) just about tolerates; Twinkle (Helly Shah) is a model, and the daughter of a Sindhi Don called Nari Ravjiani (Atul Kumar), who hates his son-in-law — improbably enough — a cardiac surgeon, Micky (Arjun Bijlani).
Twinkle is the sweet dimwit, without whom no sitcom is complete.
Finally, there’s Aditya (Sumeet Vyas) and his hysterical wife Priyanka (Manasi Parekh), who have two running gags to themselves — one is her nonstop chatter, demanding answers, saying ‘bolo bolo‘, and not giving a chance to the other person to get a word in.
The volume of her voice regularly extinguishes the candle her husband lights before a statue of Buddha. They have two unruly sons, and the bulk of their track will be seen in the next season, which is hinted at.
Comic Mayhem, Farcical Plots
In most of the episodes, the troubles of the Chumbak coterie are amusing and mostly believable.
Then suddenly, there’s a farcical section about the death, funeral and memorial gathering for the Don’s pet python!
The ladies go to a Bollywood themed costume party and get arrested, while the womanising Micky has a romantic misadventure with a jacuzzi repairwoman (Shruti Bapna), whose abandoned swimsuit causes a major tremor in Micky’s life, as his buddies try to cover up for his infidelity.
A lot of the comic moments are caused by the forgetful Kuku, Dharmendra, bimbette Twinkle, and Freddy as the man-child prone to giggling at the wrong moment.
Chumbak is an old style sitcom, which has its own charms — there is a kind of innocence to the entire we-are-together set up, the banter flies fast and there is no let up in the mayhem. If nothing else, it makes one wish for a neighbourhood like Chumbak Colony.
Chumbak streams on Netflix.
Chumbak Review Rediff Rating:
