Soap suds

I was talking to my friend and former colleague Shivangi in Delhi when the conversation veered from its framework of gossip, clothes and food into territory that, for me, is still new and interesting. I speak of that realm that is the food for many millions of minds all over the world: the television soap opera.

Well, to be honest, it is not entirely new. When I was in college, a family friend who was my local ‘mother’ introduced me to the phenomenon that was the afternoon staple in the country. It was called General Hospital and featured the trials, tribulations and torments of the people of Port Charles. There was, as is expected, a hospital involved, but it was essentially peripheral to the actual goings on in the TV show. It was chock-full of good people, bad people, love lost, found, re-lost and re-found with alternative partners at regular intervals of time. There was crime, detection and punishment, murder, embezzlement and larceny, everything to keep generations of watchers glued to their seats. And when Luke married Laura, after seasons of losing and finding her, it was rumoured to have been declared a national holiday, since so many people stayed home to savour each step of the walk down the aisle. I almost became one of them, except for a class that very inconveniently was scheduled at the same time as the great adventures of the folks down at Port Charles.

Somehow, others of this ilk, be it The Bold and the Beautiful, As the World Turns, One Life to Live or All My Children just didn’t have the same punch. From there, it was but a very short hop to nigh-time telly, most of it re-runs. Karen loved the wicked Jane Wyman manipulating her Machiavellian way through the bank accounts and families of the California elite in Falconcrest and I watched with her. We sat through a few spells of Dallas, but when Bobby’s abduction by aliens turned out to be a shower-stall dream sequence, it got too ridiculous for either of us. Soon, after much giggling and passionate argument about what should have happened versus what did, we got cable TV and switched off soaps. And, en route, switched to Soap, a wonderful parody of every possible permutation a soap opera writer could come up with, all with a hilarious twist.

Today, on Indian TV, soaps abound. Over the past few months, I have been slowly drawn into that highly coloured, over-dramatised, luridly creative world of the Indian ‘serial’. It is fun, absorbing and faintly reminiscent in every episode of something seen or heard of on American television. It all started a few months ago, when I was idly surfing channels, looking for some sort of distraction or cure for insomnia. I stopped at one on which a lady with an evil glint in her carefully shadowed eye was holding a gun pointed at a younger gentleman, while another young woman watched in horror. Many tears were flowing, though not from the gun-holder’s eyes. A commercial break shot the suspense to another planet and I switched to another channel, where a flamboyant chef was cooking up a storm. When that took a break, I went hunting for the shooting show, finally finding it after some trial and rapid fire error. The soap was Kkavyanjali, the young man was shot with blanks, his mother did the shooting and his wife was witness to the whole drama. Over the past few weeks, the young man did die (though not by his mother’s hand), the mother changed to a loving, nurturing type and the wife is marrying someone else. Oh, yes, there has also been a timeline jump along the way!

From there, I graduated to Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki, Kasamh Se and Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. While I cannot say that I am addicted or even a fan, I find the shenanigans of the various characters funny and relaxing. From childbirth out of wedlock to euthanasia, infidelity to joint family politics, killing, thievery and hatred, every aspect of human villainy is being covered, by a cast that often migrates from one show to the other – you could, for instance, find an aunt in one playing the mother in the other and a sister in the third, confusing the whole scenario considerably. In the end, I am never sure what I am watching and who has done what to whom, when, how and why.

But then, in the wild and weird world of soap operas, does it matter?