Raakh

The flood of true-crime content has turned the living room into a dark laboratory. It feels unsettling to measure which series ‘grieves better,’ which depicts ‘more realistic’ violence, or which frames ‘suffering believably’. The couch feels like a spectator’s seat to human misery. Yet, this discomfort perhaps serves the point. The niceness of a living room is often a bubble, while the city outside – as Raakh reminds this week – remains equally brutal and indifferent. In the sweltering haze of August 1978, a sudden rain washes away Delhi’s innocence. When two children, Suman and Sahil Arora (Divya and Vivan Sharma), vanish into the maw of a predatory night, the world of a decorated army man, Ashok, and his wife Mona (Aamir Bashir and Sonali Bendre), dissolves into unsolvable grief. Into this void steps Sub Inspector Jayprakash Jatav (Ali Fazal), a rookie defined by the sharp crease of his uniform and the heavy burden of his birth, hunting two shadows who kill with the casualness of a seasonal breeze. Inspired by the infamous Ranga-Billa case, Raakh is not merely a chase, but a dissection of the anatomy of crime in the Capital.

An atmospheric and deeply unsettling crime drama, Raakh draws inspiration from one of India’s most chilling criminal cases, the infamous Ranga-Billa case (1978) that shook the nation and forever altered the way people viewed safety in the capital. Most crimes are tragically remembered for the notorious criminals who commit them, while the victims are often forgotten with time. In a sea of cop dramas, Raakh urges you to look beyond the investigation and examine the origin, aftermath, and far-reaching consequences of a brutal crime on society at large. The lingering trauma of grieving parents seeking accountability and justice after losing their children makes for an emotionally difficult watch. Trial by Fire, led by Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol, explored similar emotional devastation effectively. Raakh serves as a reminder of humanity at its worst, and how such horrors force ordinary people to live with endless guilt — what if I had done something differently? Yet the real sickness lies with the criminal mind to begin with.

Two teen-aged siblings wait at a bus stop on a rainy day. The sister is on her way to sing at a radio station; her brother accompanies (and annoys) her. They are offered a lift from two strangers in a fiat. They accept, but do not return. The panicked parents inform the police. The investigation is led by rookie SI Jayprakash; the kidnapping case soon morphs into a gruesome murder case and a nationwide manhunt. This search is intercut with the ‘adventures’ of Babu and Rajjo, the two criminals, in the days leading up to the abduction. These are separate timelines a week apart, but they run parallel to each other in how the police trace the escalating journey of the killers; the present must catch up with the past before the crime enters the future. Either way, they become a definitive moment in history.

Prosit Roy’s Raakh takes a big swing in its last episode. After tip-toeing around the crime where two teens—a brother and his sister—were murdered in broad daylight in Delhi in 1978 and the man-hunt that followed, the non-linear narrative finally depicts the day of the crime. It’s a tricky sequence, illustrating the scene of crime inside the car, where the siblings are being driven by two runaway murderers. Even though there are plenty of markers even before this sequence, it was this scene that assured me about Roy’s directorial intent and creators Anusha Nandakumar and Sandeep Saket’s authorial sensitivity behind telling the story. Such a scene could easily become lurid and sensationalise the crime. Instead Raakh remaining a clear-eyed procedural even during its most heated sequence, is testament to the crew’s great care and rigour around the show’s central conflict.

You feel the violence in Raakh before you see it. It is present right from the first few moments, in something as innocuous as two teenage siblings excitedly getting ready for a much-awaited evening out, the good-natured bickering between them and their lively banter with their mother. But you, as the viewer, find your nerves on edge, holding back a threatening lump in your throat. For you know that once they walk out of that door, the Arora siblings will never come back home again. The year is 1978. The series is Raakh, Prime Video’s eight-episode watch, streaming now, which is, without a doubt, inspired by the Sanjay and Geeta Chopra double murders. Taking place in the capital, the heinous crime shocked the country, elicited a nationwide manhunt and ultimately resulted in the death sentence for perpetrators Billa and Ranga. The case shaped India’s capital punishment jurisprudence, fundamentally altered children’s safety policies, and set landmark media rights precedents. Since then, it has been touched upon on screen, with varying degrees of fact and fiction, quite a few times, with the most recent example being the Netflix winner Black Warrant.