‘Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives’ Review: ‘Delhi-usion’ Wins This Round of Mumbai vs Delhi

STREAMING ON: Netflix

There is new money and there is old money, I was told at a Delhi bar. If they are letting you know they are rich, then darling — again, I am citing, not stating — you are in the company of new money, and god save you from their performance. “Nakhra”, I think, was the word used. May you at least enjoy it. With that blessing, we begin the third season of The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives, only this time it’s called Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives, which insists and keeps insisting till you begin to get suspicious about it, that okay, fine, Delhi and Mumbai are cut from different cloths.

There is the old gang, the “Gareeb Kardashians” — Maheep Kapoor (wife of Sanjay Kapoor), Seema Sajdeh (ex-wife of Sohail Khan), Bhavana Pandey (wife of Chunky Panday), and Neelam Kothari (wife of Samir Soni). The “wife of” is both ironic and sincere, both a winking response to the feminist backlash of identifying women by their husbands and a reason for that very backlash. Irony is a thing Dharma Productions and Dharmatic Entertainment wield as a weapon to give the illusion of ageing well, of being “in the know”. It shimmers its mirage of modernity, holding close its cloying roots to fungal tradition.

Perhaps because these four have squandered every possibility of deep-cut interpersonal drama, or perhaps because the pretence of having interpersonal drama was running thin, they injected into the veins of the show, for the third season, some “Delhi-usion”. The Mumbai women were just becoming too real for reality television, with their home renovations and idol worship of Gauri Khan, who makes a cameo and advertises her dreary interior design, yet again, yet again, yet again. And just like the Bollywood wives spend their time being carted off from one air-conditioned cocoon through the air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned boutique, no ounce of the city being experienced except as traffic, the Delhi women, too, are all homebodies who speak to each other in Manish Malhotra’s boutique or in the cracks of a Rimple and Harpreet Narula shoot. This might be logistics — of life, of shooting — but it gives the effect of frictionless cities, that how much ever you might want to see Delhi and Mumbai as different, the women could be in either city and we would not know if there was no montage of the India Gate or Mumbai Central as a prologue. A city, though, is more than its myth. These women hold onto the myth, thinking they are holding onto the city, and I suppose in trying to force cultural distinctions between Delhi and Mumbai, the show forgets that, at the end of the day, these are not manicured myths, but beating and bleeding heart cities.

From Delhi, there is Riddhima Kapoor Sahni, sister of Ranbir Kapoor — who opens this show, implying exactly how she found her way in this rhinestone rollcall — discussing her latest trip with her mother Neetu Kapoor as Rimple and Harpreet Narula coo about how perfect they are looking in a mother-daughter photoshoot. (The images from that shoot dropped yesterday with the show.) There is Kalyani Saha Chawla — “a serial entrepreneur” — who is single but desperate to change that, and then, my favourite, Shalini Passi.

Passi is the stuff of wet dreams for a director of reality television. We first see her house before we see her. The people in the show try to convince us to make that leap from “she is an art collector” to “she understands art”. The schtick does not stick. But that was never the point. By that time, she is trying to convince us she is an artist, and by this time, we will eat whatever she is serving.

When everyone else sees a camera that is shooting a reality show, she sees a camera that is shooting her debut film. I don’t think I ever saw her slouch or walk awkwardly. She shoots up into the sky and walks deliberately — every step calculated for maximum fame. She sits on swings looking out into the distance, and when it rains, she runs into the ocean in slow motion. (Mauritius. She would rather be caught dead than be seen by the Yamuna.) She dresses up as Cleopatra for her entry scene — it is an entry scene with her entourage, nicknamed — I hope — Daya and Baya. Irony is the stuff that is made to rest its weary feet at her doorstep because it just cannot keep up. There is a reason the Bollywood wives, too, caring little for Sahni or Chawla, fixate on Passi. Her character — and let us not forget these people are playing characters, even if the outlines of the two feel dangerously like they overlap — plays out like Lisa (Lisa Haydon) from Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016), a ditz who energises every frame with her presence. I mean, Passi cannot go out in the sun. Obviously, she is superstitious. She does not gossip because it is bad for her skin.

She loves looking at things as personifications and metaphors. Her home? “[It] is a personification of me — beautiful and impractical”. In a rage room where the women are bludgeoning computers and glass bottles, Passi is petting a keyboard with her club, wondering if she could take apart a television and make a beautiful lamp out of it. Diwali, amiright?

There is a delicious delusion here, bankrolled by her do-gooder plasma-donating husband, Sanjay Passi, with a tilak on his forehead. When Maheep Kapoor looks at Shalini walking down in her Cleopatra dress, making an entrance for her own charity ball — don’t ask me for what, something about healing poor kids by making them look at art — with cleavage giving Bernini a run for his money, Kapoor looks at Sanjay Passi and says, “Your wife is looking hot!” and he responds with a namaste.

The show, by design, floats over their material conditions, except to insist once in a while that they are rich, unattainably so. (It makes sense that the show lassoes in Delhi after the illusion of Mumbai wealth started fading.) Where, for example, do the Bollywood wives stay when they are in Delhi, which for them feels less of a tiresome journey than from Bandra to Worli, where Sajdeh has shifted, to be alone, much to the chagrin of her former best friend, Maheep.

The point, I suppose, of pitting Mumbai against Delhi was to thicken the bond of the Bollywood wives, because every time they see each other after hanging out with the Delhi wives, they sigh and hold onto each other as though they have just experienced collective turbulence. The Delhi women, on the other hand, are fickle, speaking of each other as friends and sisters and whatnot, only to speak of them as strangers in the very next episode. The forced friendship of the Delhi women becomes as tiring as the sugary bond of survival that marks the Mumbai women, though one always prefers acid to affection. Read the genre rules.

During the promotional rounds of the first season, someone asked Maheep what the craziest rumour she had heard about herself was, and she said, “I wish people were talking about me.” In this season, Chawla notes, “I’d rather be spoken about than not”. This show is, then, merely a wish fulfilment if the wish is attention, the desire is the spotlight, and the greed is the contested real estate of screen space. Even to critique it is to fulfil it. So here, I suppose, is to fulfilment.