We do not whistle for Hathiram Chaudhary. And yet the bond we feel towards him is spontaneous, almost effortless.

This is because he shares something of our too-ideal dreams, our wry acceptance of our limitations, our useful frustrations, and our pointless sprints, explains Sreehari Nair.

Photograph: Kind courtesy Prime Video/Instagram

1. He is an Indian, Rohtak-born. His precinct is Outer Jamuna Paar in Delhi. His currency of operation is that tough, drain-pipe humanity, which he has to preserve in an increasingly murky world.

High-profile police cases that turn out to be zero-sum games are his to negotiate. Slouch-shouldered and pot-bellied, he goes through a series of spirals only to come upon dead ends.

To do this night after night is to earn those bleary, exhausted eyes that are his signature.

Those eyes have wonderful bags under them that touch us deeply.

We keep persisting with Paatal Lok‘s hardbound cynicism because we know that even if wiped out and shattered, we can still come home to Hathiram Chaudhary. We are sure he would let us in with a shrug.

2. This is an age of ‘mass-movie anxiety.’

Before every big-ticket, big-superstar release, our anticipation builds to a feverish pitch. It quickly devolves into weariness when we are served that same cloak of invincibility and those same shticks that have been in place since the 1970s.

When we blow whistles at such movies, it’s not so much a validation of star-power as a requiem for our innocent self of years ago.

We do not whistle for Hathiram Chaudhary. And yet the bond we feel towards him is spontaneous, almost effortless.

This is because he shares something of our too-ideal dreams, our wry acceptance of our limitations, our useful frustrations, and our pointless sprints.

He’s the first to go after a hot lead, first to get knocked down. But unlike those box-office emperors, he’s not aided in his pursuits by VFX, rope-coordinated stunts, green screens, and safety nets.

To appreciate the stakes at work here, you have to understand that every time Hathiram Chaudhary has to fall, Jaideep Ahlawat actually falls, and every time Hathiram has to get hurt, Ahlawat actually gets hurt.

The scrapes, the gashes, the stabs, the tears — yes, he’s an authentically cut Indian hero!

3. Writer Sudip Sharma’s style is not simply to present a puzzle. He also wants to expose the horrors of a hidden conspiracy.

He wishes to convey a certain irreparable rot and keep you tethered to its stink.

The problem with Sharma’s approach (evident once again in Paatal Lok Season 2) is that when the puzzle is eventually solved, not only does the explanation sound not very interesting, it also seems highly implausible.

So we feel cheated by the stink that has been let loose.

Sudip Sharma is locked in the tropes of pulp writing, but his hero mercifully isn’t.

Working close to his unconscious, Jaideep Ahlawat fashions Hathiram Chaudhary as a constellation of lifelike details — right down to how he swears from the corner of his mouth, and frequently when he’s short of breath.

Those half-nods, those operatic pauses, and those spiky-faced Kyus are more than just seasonings: They are like pointillist brushstrokes leading up to a great Seurat masterpiece.

It’s nothing less than exciting to watch a creation get away from his creator.

Even when Sudip Sharma’s defiant nihilism eats into your viewing pleasure, Hathiram Chaudhary remains a feast of the most human qualities.

IMAGE: Jaideep Ahlawat makes a triumphant return as Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary in Pataal Lok Season 2 streaming on Amazon Prime.

4. Let us contemplate the name for a bit.

It’s a name that Dickens and Saul Bellow (themselves, great namers) would have been proud to come up with.

It’s a name such as Ebenezer Scrooge or Charlie Citrine, fictional people whose fates seemed built into their names.

It’s a name that evokes a kind of trisyllabic dance, the sort of name that cannot pass your lips without making you break into a smile.

One of Sudip Sharma and Jaideep Ahlawat’s chief projects on Paatal Lok is to take a character named Hathiram and give him true tragic force.

He’s an incorruptible knight dealing with conspiracies too big for him, a gallant bum in a sordid world.

Throughout the show, he’s lied to, used, double-crossed. Yet he’s the only one who cares.

In the second season, when a kid loses both his parents, you don’t want anybody other than Hathiram Chaudhary to take charge — for this man of the law is also a natural hero of the dispossessed, the displaced, the disillusioned.

The kid goes to Hathiram’s heart. He feels it on his shoulders. You see it in his eyes.

IMAGE: Jaideep Ahlawat with Ishwak Singh who plays ACP Imran Ansari in Paatal Lok Season 2. Photograph: ANI Photo

5. There’s a strong case to be made that his entire quest is anchored in the father-son relationship.

The thrashings that the system hands out remind him of his babuji. The old despot is long gone, but Hathiram continues to sense his presence in the oppressive system, its bureaucracies and its machinations.

On the other hand, he wishes to redeem himself by looking out for some son-like figure, someone tender to rescue from the pits of hell.

His own boy distances himself from Hathiram’s untucked shirts and unwieldy sports shoes, and the inspector brings home a round-eyed orphan.

He has a junior at the workplace towards whom he has genuine paternal feelings but who’s a little too clean-cut, and in the latest season he meets an informant whose streetwise attitude and nimble parallelisms are closer to Hathiram’s taste.

They say tyranny breeds tyranny. But Hathiram, who tends to the rituals of parenthood with gnashed teeth, is an honorable exception to the maxim. He would rather be a father who tries and fails than a father who fails to try.

6. The man’s resourcefulness is really a miracle.

Running through a body that’s built to take blows is an instinct that never seems to panic. It’s an instinct that becomes sharper in moments of chaos, an instinct that doesn’t go to sleep even when his leg does.

All in all, he has a psychic’s faith in mystery, in the power of serendipity. We accept this, and so we accept the convenient plot-twists of Season 2.

It also helps that his monologues are not uttered for effect, and he shows us how they apply in the real world.

As a police officer who doesn’t waste precious seconds groping for the light switch in a dark filing room, who turns his mouth into a torch-holder on a dime, Hathiram demonstrates the precise difference between Naukri and Duty.

Watching him sift through a pile of files with the deftness of a touch-typist, you know what grace under pressure truly is.

IMAGE: Inspector Hathiram Chowdhury interrogates Hathoda Tyagi in the opening episode of Paatal Lok Season 1.

7. Is it because he operates so cheekily outside the protocol that he does not get the professional rewards he deserves?

Perhaps.

But imagine Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary being duly appreciated. That wouldn’t fit his song, would it?

In a weird way, you don’t want to see him get ‘promoted’ for fear that he would lose the common touch.

With Hathiram, it’s not the arc of achievement that you crave but that spark of recognition.

He’s at his most statuesque when he’s waving away a soft-bribe, or wearing his cap as if to make a statement, or taking a quick whiff of his underwear before putting it out on the clothesline all the while fighting a set of stubborn chattering teeth.

8. I just love his scenes with his wife, played by Gul Panag with a transcendent fire forever lighting up her brow.

I love how much she adores him, despite often being awfully close to strangling him.

And isn’t he the ultimate master of spoiling a perfect moment of marital bliss?

While he’s out on an assignment in Nagaland, she gives him the cold vibes and doesn’t take his calls.

After many attempts, when he finally gets through to her, you see him smile. It’s that Hathiram smile, as rare as a clear Delhi day.

And then what happens?

Howitzers of incomplete sentences are exchanged over the short call, they end up quarrelling bitterly, and he hangs up on her.

“Now there’s a golden couple,” I said to myself, “always testing each other in a delusional bid to improve each other.”

If the Macbeths ever wished to go on a spring break, I would gladly replace them with the Chaudharys.

IMAGE: Jaideep Ahlawat in Paatal Lok.

9. It’s not an easy deception to bring off, but Hathiram’s dialogues manage to be massy without ever being self-serving.

Think about it.

The refrains are Haryanvi laments modified into comic observations.

The asides — such as a remark about the effects of police on a person’s uric acid levels — are the stuff of dark theatre.

When he says ‘Koi Apathi?‘ to a gang of safari-clad goons, it sounds like a comradely variation on ‘Do you feel lucky, punk?’

These are sucker punches, but they are also touched with a sense of sadness. Not once does the speaker of these lines come across as ‘nauseatingly brave’ — and that’s the genius of the performance.

What Hathiram Chaudhary says carries so much weight because of what he implies but never says. The groans speak of groans that have been silenced, and when he drinks straight from a bottle it’s not a moment of celebration.

IMAGE: Jaideep Ahlawat in a scene from Paatal Lok Season 1. Photograph: ANI Photo

10. He has a political stance; he most certainly does. But he never uses it as a tool to patronize, instruct, or elevate himself to a higher moral plane.

Does this explain his broad appeal, why he’s equally beloved by right-wingers and lefties?

Here’s Hathiram’s version of liberalism, as unrehearsed as they come.

In the first season, while standing up for a Muslim colleague, he doesn’t position himself as the progressive one battling a bunch of bigots.

On the contrary, his actions suggest that steering clear of bigotry is something we all can aspire to.

In Season 2, there’s a wonderful scene involving the revelation of a close friend’s sexuality, where he rebukes his personal brand of Haryanvi machismo as he lends his support to the slightly embarrassed friend.

“I’m a country bumpkin with no knowledge of gay parades. But if it feels right to you, then that’s all that matters,” so says the bumpkin, not emphatically but searchingly, and with a faint note of some swear-word bubbling up in his throat.

His inclusive attitude is unique: It may not possess the jingle of a placard slogan, but it surely has the warmth of a hardboiled embrace.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com