Musafir Cafe

Eventually, Sharanya Rajgopal’s Musafir Cafe settles into the cosiness of a novel found in a railway station bookstall. Those unintimidating 200-page paperbacks, which one buys for an overnight journey. Here, it happens in the seventh episode of this eight-episode series. Sudha (Vedika Pinto) is a pretty, impulsive, recklessly-ambitious girl from Bhopal – a version of a metropolitan idea of a small-town firebrand. The kind who discovered ‘Carpe Diem’ in her adolescence and never looked back. She has a job offer from Mumbai, which she reluctantly accepts.

Vikrant Massey’s Musafir Cafe, a slow romance drama, comes at a time when there is anger on the streets of India and spy thrillers and murder mysteries are dominating screens- big and small. The eight-part series, produced by Massey, who also plays the lead in the show, takes a practical approach to modern-day relationships, where love alone is not enough to make a relationship work. It reiterates that timing is everything, and that two right people can drift apart if the timing is not right. Created and written by Sharanya Rajgopal and based on Divya Prakash Dubey’s novel of the same name, Musafir Cafe is refreshing, real and breaks the clutter of action thrillers that have been releasing of late.

A three-way modern romance set in a small town. That’s the pitchline of Musafir Cafe, based on a novel of the same name by Divya Prakash Dubey, created by Sharanya Rajgopal and directed by Ruchir Arun, and the eight-part show takes the memo very seriously indeed. Chander and Sudha — someone here is evidently a fan of Dharamveer Bharati’s classic novel of the same name — meet and ignite in Bhopal. Having quit his software job in the US, he works in a dull government office, nursing a dream of opening his own cafe in the hills, while meeting suitable girls with a view to marriage.

Love conquers all… only here, the heroine, Sudha (Vedika Pinto), believes: “Sahi pyar hamare liye sahi ho yeh zaroori nahi (It’s not essential that true love is right for us).” She meets her suitor Chander (Vikrant Massey) for a matrimonial alliance. He is a software engineer who wants to set up a cafe in the mountains, hence the title of the series. Sudha is a lawyer whose ambitions touch sky high and marriage figures nowhere in her scheme of things. They fall in love and the villains here are not ma-baap or a ‘judgy’ society, but a clash of aspirations. As the storyline set in Bhopal moves in two timelines set apart by eight years, we clearly see they have moved on. Chander has not only realised his dream in Mussoorie, but found love again in Preeti (Mahima Makwana).

For most of its 8 episodes, Musafir Cafe has the aesthetic of streaming television from the 2015-16 days (also known as the Little Things age). This natural-artifice aesthetic thrived when YouTube was still the platform for millennial motifs wrapped in modest productions: relatable DIY ‘content,’ relationship-core characters, designer dialogue (“travelers don’t just change places, they travel within themselves”), a gooey soundtrack and title montages, pastel-coloured narratives and branded locations. As watchable as these shows were, they were almost indistinguishable from each other. Given the current onset of true-crime fatigue, this romantic drama might feel either dated or nostalgic — or both at once.

In Jab Tak Hai Jaan, Shah Rukh Khan tells Katrina Kaif, ‘Har ishq ka ek waqt hota hai’ to make sense of their estrangement. It’s as though all of showrunner Sharanya Rajgopal’s Musafir Cafe hinges on this line where two love stories run parallel and reveal the fickle face of modern-day love. An adaptation of Divya Prakash Dubey’s popular Hinglish novel of the same name, Musafir Cafe travels between now and then as the origins of Chander (Vikrant Massey) and Sudha’s (Vedika Pinto) lovey-dovey past loom over the polite affections between Chander and Preeti (Mahima Makwana) in the present. One was his love, another is his partner, a distinction observed rather impersonally in Musafir Cafe.

Set between Bhopal and misty Mussoorie, the Netflix series Musafir Cafe follows three lives that become entwined through chance encounters and life-altering choices across time and distance. Software engineer Chander (Vikrant Massey) longs for a life that finally feels like his own, while the fiercely independent divorce lawyer Sudha (Vedika Pinto) is determined to shape her future on her terms. Completing the trio is Preeti (Mahima Makwana), whose wanderlust complements her quiet resilience. Created and written by Sharanya Rajgopal and directed by Ruchir Arun (Little Things, Ghar Waapsi), the series draws on characters from Divya Prakash Dubey’s Hindi novel of the same name. At times, Musafir Cafe feels like it could have been a breezy, crisp film.

एक लड़का है, जिसे शहर की आपाधापी भरी जिंदगी छोड़कर पहाड़ों पर सुकून से जीना है। एक लड़की है, जिसे देश के सबसे भागते-दौड़ते शहर मुंबई में अपना मुकाम बनाना है। लड़के को, वक्त लेकर अपनी परफेक्ट कॉफी बनाना पसंद है। लड़की चाय लवर है, क्योंकि वो जल्दी बन जाती है। लड़का जेन ऑस्टेन की ‘प्राइड ऐंड प्रिज्युडिस’ का मुरीद है, तो लड़की फ्रैंज काफ्का के ‘मेटामॉर्फोसिस’ की। मतलब यह कि दोनों के मिजाज में कोई मेल नहीं है। बावजूद इसके उनके दिल मिल जाते हैं और जन्म लेती है ‘मुसाफिर कैफे’ की प्रेम कहानी। चर्चित लेखक दिव्य प्रकाश दुबे के उपन्‍यास की यह प्रेम कहानी अब 25-25 मिनट के 8 एपिसोड की सीरीज की शक्ल में आई है, जो पुराने दौर के सुकून और ठहराव वाले माहौल में आधुनिक ख्याल वाले प्यार की खूबसूरत जुगलबंदी है।