By Rimli Bhattacharya
Mumbai Diaries, Season 2, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, is based on the devastating Mumbai floods of 26 July 2005. As depicted in the series, I was stranded at Borivali station waiting for a train to reach home, while my father tried to get in touch with me constantly. I was at a hotel and was completely oblivious to what was happening around me. By the time I reached the station, I was waist deep in water. I was floating. The series made me cry shamelessly in front of my bewildered daughter who couldn’t believe that a series can have such an impact on her mother.
Nikhil Advani did a splendid job in creating the Season 2. Instead of portraying women as damsels in distress, he has represented them as brave. Since women have an equal EQ and IQ factor like any testosterone loaded man, they deserve to be treated equally.
The Series
While the rains splash angrily, a heavily pregnant Ananya decides to accompany her husband Dr Kaushik Oberoi for an ongoing hearing in a shootout case in which he has been voted as 73% criminal for attending to a terrorist (to know more, please watch Season 1). This is the day the judge is supposed to pronounce the verdict. However, he doesn’t turn up because of the heavy rains. Ananya then takes her chauffer driven car to Pune wishing to spend the weekend there with her husband who is about to join her. Dr. Oberoi, who is the head of the Trauma Department at a renowned government-run hospital, decides to cater to his patients prior to joining Ananya. Fate wills otherwise.
In the meantime, a family of three comes to the hospital grievously injured. The man is treated with first aid and survives the fatality, but his wife and daughter need urgent attention. When Dr. Oberoi is asked to attend to the wife, the doctor freezes for few moments as he recalls his courtroom trials which leads to the death of the wife who could have been saved otherwise. Here comes the junior doctor Sujata Ajawale’s intervention.
When the couple’s little child is denied treatment by the patriarchal establishment of the hospital, Doctor Sujata disobeys rules and goes out of her way to save the girl child, Saba Rahmotaullah. As Sujata commits a crime by forging Dr. Oberoi’s signature to perform the surgery, she is suspended and is thrown out of the hospital even though her superiors know how hard she has tried to reach this point in her career. Standing in the unrelenting rains, she tries to connect with her teammates Dr. Parekh and Dr. Ahaan Mirza to know about her little patient. Defying the extreme weather conditions, she manages to save children from a juvenile home who are sexually abused by the owner and are victims of Hepatitis B. With her herculean courage and grit, she takes those children to her hospital even as she is denied access to the outpatient department. The children are eventually treated, and the abuser is taken into judicial custody.
Dr. Parkeh, another junior doctor who lost her mother to the Mumbai blast (please see Season 1), saves the life of a patient, Sandeep aka Sanjana, who undergoes gender transformation. A suicidal Sanjana opens her heart to Parekh and says that the society treats her a man while she is not. Parekh puts her career at stake to save Sanjana from another suicide attempt and convinces her parents about the complex adolescent issue. She asks them to meet the hospital counsellor for therapy. Kudos to Nikhil Advani for dealing with this issue so sensitively.
Social worker Dr. Chitra Das, a victim of abusive marriage and gaslighting, comes face to face with her London-returned husband Dr. Chandra. As she struggles with her old memories, she is unable to cosy up to her abusive partner. She manages to flee his clutches when he forces himself on her and raises an alarm to arrest the man who has also injured Dr. Ahaan gravely. Apparently, the young Dr. Ahaan has fallen in love with Chitra and has a scuffle with Dr. Chandra who almost kills him. Chitra stays by Ahaan’s side and claims that she will be pressing criminal charges against Dr. Chandra very soon. A victim in her past, she becomes a victor.
Let’s get back to the real fighter Ananya. Ananya gets stuck at Sion circle, goes in labor and gets swept away in the dirty waters which leads to sepsis. By the time Dr. Oberoi manages to reach her, it is too late. Ananya is saved by some people from a nearby slum where she gets help from a midwife to turn her baby upside down because of its breech position. While the women try their best to save the mother and the unborn child, Ananya needs hospital care. Wading through the flooded waters, Dr. Oberoi takes her to his hospital. Ananya develops a fever, and her pulse falls gradually. She bleeds but delivers a boy through the C Section. She fights sepsis valiantly, but the disease takes her life at the end. She dies in the arms of her husband. Before her death, she makes him promise her that he won’t fear the trial and will always sport a smile come what may.
The child Saba Rahmotaullah proves to be another tough girl. Dr. Oberoi saves her and performs the inter cranial neurosurgery with the assistance of Dr. Subramanium and Dr. Sujata Ajawale. Dr. Oberoi gifts a life while he himself is a broken man.
The young journalist Ms. Hirani quits her job as she refuses to utter any further lies about the flood situation on the request of the news channel owners for whom she works. She exposes the real story of the bridge collapse at Dadar which is constructed by the same group owned by her news channel owners. She brings her gravely injured cameraman to the hospital, but he loses his leg in the bridge collapse. He survives, thanks to Dr. Oberoi, who despite going through a tough time doesn’t capitulate for a single moment. He attends to Hirani’s patient, who had earlier spoken trash about him during his court trials (see Series 1).
Nikhil Advani steals the show with his stupendous casting of female characters. The series might have several weak links but the portrayal of the female characters in the series is superb. Women are brave, women are strong and women can handle their battles alone. I wished Ananya to have lived.
The End
I had managed to reach home that critical night in the last train that had crawled out like a snail from the Borivali station. I was united with my parents. But I had witnessed the damage, the flood and the frenzy. Mumbai Diaries captures the Mumbai I had faced on that fateful day.
Bio:
Rimli Bhattacharya is a first class gold medalist in Mechanical Engineering with a MBA in supply chain management. She has contributed to two anthologies, A Book of light and Muffled Moans and has written two solo books, The crosshairs of life and That day it rained and other stories. Her other works have appeared in twenty-nine literary magazines & E-Zines. She is also an Indian Classical dancer.
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