I have an intimate understanding of stalking — not from first-hand experience, but thanks to the beast we lovingly call Bollywood. I have grown up believing it’s romantic, a legitimate form of wooing that’s proof of the stalker’s perseverance. It’s a playful push-pull dynamic (we all internalised it before we knew better, so shut up). Why won’t she say yes already? She loves him; she just doesn’t know it yet! Right? Right?
Enter Pushpavalli , a new Amazon Prime web series created by (and starring) comedian Sumukhi Suresh. It inverts that tired formula, placing a woman stalker at its centre and, as a bonus, adding bucket-loads of nuance to a subject that’s often trivialised as harmless tomfoolery, a punchline at best, in commercial cinema.
Complete breakdown
Sumukhi plays the titular Pushpavalli, a young woman who moves from Bengaluru to Bhopal to chase Nikhil, a businessman she met and fell for at a food conference in Bhopal. What follows is a study of her deteriorating mental health, as one bad decision after another gives way to a chilling conclusion (with plenty of laughs along the way).
Across these eight episodes, her initial infatuation transforms into affection, then love, obsession, fixation, crippling jealousy, and finally, a complete breakdown of all reason. The heart of the storyline — Pushpavalli’s ‘love’ for Nikhil — is treated with finesse; it lurks in the background for the first few episodes as it becomes apparent that it’s getting incrementally worse in her head.
Sumukhi does an admirable job both writing and portraying the protagonist as someone who exists between the lines. For all her endearing qualities and relaxed interactions with Nikhil, we can never quite cheer her on, yet it’s hard to actively want her to get her comeuppance. There’s something dark and twisted beneath the surface; she’s likeable and you feel for her in her Tantalus-like pursuit, but she’s also manipulative, self-absorbed, and maybe a little bit evil. To wit, she gets a dimwitted colleague fired to cover her backside, in the very first episode.
It should be said that, lofty ambition aside, the stalking storyline is actually the weakest part of this otherwise excellent show. See, Pushpavalli is hilarious. But the repeated circling back to its central conceit, through recurring Bhopal flashbacks — shot through a fantastical, otherworldly viewpoint — and cute/ awkward little meetings between the two, seems more like a plot contrivance than anything.
In fact, for the first six episodes, I often found myself groaning at Nikhil’s appearances. He serves as an audience surrogate, the straight man in a world full of dysfunctional characters. But he overstays his welcome as his perfect-ness, seen through Pushpavalli’s compromised perspective, seems repetitive after a point.
Away from the mush of the central couple though, the show thrives. Sumukhi’s refined comedic chops help create a goofy, self-contained world for Pushpavalli. Beyond the odd outdoor excursion, she’s mostly bouncing between terrace phone-calls with her mother (through the recurring motif of an overbearing mum trying to get her daughter married off); the anarchic PG she lives in, barely held together by the erratic, and possibly dyslexic, landlady, Vasu; the chai stall where her “informant” feeds her details about Nikhil’s whereabouts; and the library, run by Pankaj, childhood friend and boss.
Punchline wildcard
It’s these sitcommy moments where the show is truly elevated, free from the burden of everlasting love. Sumukhi is a versatile and self-assured writer, jumping effortlessly from awkward cringe-comedy to comedy of errors to slapstick to socially relevant material, although the standout moments come when the characters are simply allowed to be their worst possible selves.
Comedian Naveen Richard as Pushpavalli’s boss is great, hiding his many, many insecurities and vulnerabilities — in school, he was called, by rotation, ‘Ch****a Chutney’, ‘Upma Boy’, and the quite brilliant ‘G**du Bonda’ — behind a foul-mouthed, constantly sneering veneer. Pushpavalli’s roommates are these nihilistic, conjoined twins (not literally) who execute plans both devious and corny in synchronised movements, mostly out of boredom, while the rat-a-tat landlady sheds her initial broad characterisation to become a kind of punchline wildcard.
The show tackles experiences often specific to women with some ease. The uproarious set-piece about flashing, which the PG inmates discuss with horror as Pushpavalli stays blissfully unaware of what it means, has multiple payoffs, finally culminating in Vasu, a hockey stick, a skeevy man, and swear-words in a language I don’t understand.
Pushpavalli’s mother repeatedly refers to her size during marriage-talk, and there’s an extended bit about periods and not touching cooking utensils at “that time”. It’s a sad indictment that these aspects of life, when tackled on screen, still hold some novelty.
But beyond that, Pushpavalli doesn’t just bring these subjects to light but mines them for comic potential, never missing an uncomfortable punchline. Joking about sensitive issues is a path loaded with landmines, where the intent and execution matter — it’s as much about how and why something is tackled as it is about the ‘what’.
Pushpavalli , in that respect, does exactly what it sets out to.
The author is a freelance culture writer from New Delhi who wishes he’d studied engineering instead.
