Toaster

It’s been a while since we watched a good Bollywood comedy. And perhaps longer since a director has used the perfect comic timing of Rajkummar Rao in a movie script. Rao, who has featured in a spate of mostly unforgettable films in recent years, perhaps got bored with the repeated roles that were being offered to him year after year and decided to back a genuinely funny film called Toaster. Released on Netflix directly, it’s the kind of film that makes you laugh out loud at mundanity, the everyday chaos that the Indian middle-class balances in life. Directed by Vivek Daschaudhary and produced by Rao’s wife, Patralekha, Toaster feels refreshing amid the heavy-duty pan-India action films that filmmakers are constantly feeding us.

My first brush with miserly behavior arrived through a childhood friend’s father. It’s not that he couldn’t afford things; hoarding money was simply his personality. Petrol, AC timings, electricity, discount sales, ice cream bowls, grocery bills: nothing was beyond him. He often claimed that he bought their first bungalow and car from all these micro-savings. After a point, I think he pretended to be a bigger cheapskate because he enjoyed our reactions. It became a performance to elicit shock and chuckles; he would even ask me why I’m having an extra chapati (“atta is not free”) to push everyone’s buttons. I grew up to be cautious with money — borderline stingy, even — because he had reframed the condition as a punchline of sorts. At some level, I convinced myself that it’s funny. So when I see incorrigable tightwads on screen, I’m immediately amused. They don’t even have to be mined for laughs. And there’s no place like Mumbai to normalise the tragicomic humour that haunts a penny-pinching protagonist. The city almost forces upon its people — regardless of social strata and wealth — an inherent middle-classness to process its absurd premiums and myths. It’s so expensive that being frugal is more of a biological need than a mental state.