Home » Features » Raat Jawaan Hain: A Joyous Take On Friendships & Early Parenthood

Features

Raat Jawaan Hain: A Joyous Take On Friendships & Early Parenthood

Sumeet Vyas’ wonderful new show, <em>Raat Jawaan Hain</em> puts forth a radical proposition: what if friends are <em>just</em> friends, in all their banality?

Ishita+Sengupta

Oct 11, 2024

Poster detail, Raat Jawaan Hai. Sony LIV

COCO MELLORS’ Blue Sisters, the 2024 novel about sisterhood, opens with a strident thought, “A sister is not a friend.” The author follows this by breaking down the harshness of the sentiment: “ Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal, as a friend?” It is a perfectly working rationale except that it makes equal sense when flipped around. Friendships are so banal that they inevitably require the crutch of relationships — ‘a long-lost sister’, ‘a brother from another mother’ — to imprint intimacy. They are so replaceable that they require the baggage of crisis to prove their worth.

Most depiction of friendships lean into this. Friends are who we reconnect with after a heartbreak (Dil Chahta Hai Wake Up Sid, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani), friends are who we fall in love with after losing a loved one (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai), and friends are who become families in the absence of one (Rang De Basanti, 3 Idiots). As if the only way to appreciate friendship is to legitimise it by making friends more than friends. And yet, Sumeet Vyas’ wonderful new show, Raat Jawaan Hain puts forth a radical proposition: what if friends are just friends, in all their banality? It feels radical because it runs the risk of making the friendship look replaceable.

Radhika (Anjali Anand), Suman (Priya Bapat) and Avinash (Barun Sobti) are childhood friends. When we meet them, they are adults navigating early parenthood. All three have toddlers in need of constant care, and this has altered their lives. Radhika has left her corporate job to stay at home with her child, so has Avinash. Suman, the introvert in the group, is feeling the change of parenthood in a different way. She and her husband haven’t had sex in months.

For a story about friendship, a premise such as this opens up specific pathways of cementing the relationship. The possibilities are endless, like an unkind partner, absent companionship or a decaying marriage, for either of them to step in and be more than friends. Or, in the language of a narrative, earn the friendship. Raat Jawaan Hain hints at this lightly by suggesting that Suman nursed a childhood crush on Avinash, and the latter indulges in occasional flirting. There is also the fact that Radhika’s husband, Rishi (Priyansh Jora) a physiotherapist by profession, enjoys a weekend with friends even as she stays indoors with her child.

But the sustained joy of Vyas’ directorial debut resides in its refusal of pursuing any of it. The intricately crafted series portrays friendship without making it compete with any other relationship. All the three marriages in Raat Jawaan Hain are as functional and dysfunctional as the next partnership. None of the partners are outrightly evil or inconsiderate. Each is learning to be a spouse while negotiating with the new-found identity of being a parent. If Rishi makes a plan to go out with his friends, he also crumbles on seeing tears in Radhika’s eyes. If Suman’s husband, Sattu (Vikram Singh Chauhan) comes back late every night, he also skips a meeting so that the friends can go and watch a film. The distinctness of their marriages could have spawned their own shows. Much like the lead characters.

Radhika, Suman and Avinash are all well-rounded individuals with enough complexities to be headlining their own stories. Little details go a long way. We see Radhika’s widower father (Kumud Mishra) in one episode and his presence provides enough context to her sure footedness. She has grown up without a mother and that loss fortified her to stand up for herself. That her daughter’s name is an anachronistic Kadambari also loosely points to the fact that maybe she was named after her mother. Similarly for Suman, growing up as the youngest child in a conservative Marathi household has contributed to her shy disposition. Being with an overbearing mother and sibling made her timid but also emboldened her to take that one dash of defiance and marry a Sikh man.

Avi, on the other hand, is content being a stay at home dad. There is a stray mention of his father being abusive and although it is not overstated, the detail lends a subtext to his being. Once a corporate high-flyer, he quit his job to look after his child. His wife Svadha (Hasleen Kaur) is a lawyer and runs the household. In many ways, his character feels like an extension of his role in Tu Hai Mera Sunday (2016), a slacker who got intimidated by the big bad world. Parenthood has disguised the real reason but his conditioning flares up in tiny ways like complaining about being a parent to a relative after being snubbed by his own father.

The experience, in fact, serves as an effective foreground for all three of them. On the surface, it binds them together but the task of looking after a child also doubles up as an implicit reason that helps them belong. It takes a while but Radhika admits that she hated the corporate job before and the feeling remains unchanged when she goes back to try once again. It is no different for Suman as she shares that once her son grows up, she will take long naps in the afternoon.

The merit of Raat Jawaan Hain resides in giving enough room to them to be flesh and blood people, and enough space for us to read them as one. Yet, it is a story about friendship. The remarkable thing about the series is that it is ostensibly about friendship and the unassuming ways it infiltrates our lives. The outing reiterates the significance of friends without letting it hijack the personalities of the people involved or the other connections they share. It is a tall task to accomplish but Raat Jawaan Hain pulls it off and a lot gets done by the tremendous writing by Khyati Anand-Puthran.

There is an ease in her work that refrains from trying too hard. All the characters, even the spouses and the well-cast parents, are written as people which accounts for the lived-in quality to their interactions, and also what holds things together when the drama dithers a little (stand-up comic Anirban Dasgupta is credited with additional dialogues). The performances aid this. Sobti is terrific in the turn of an affable man with blindspots, a beige flag if you will, who has moved away from the all-men locker talk of his colleagues but holds a cigarette in his hand as a last vestige of his profession. Bapat is reliably good but it is Anand who is truly compelling. The actor had a limited role in Karan Johar’s Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023) but she is here in almost every scene and riveting a role that in lesser hands could have been annoying or billed as a bully.

At its heart Raat Jawaan Hain is a clear-eyed portrait of friendship after the elusive Goa trip, the many adolescent heartbreaks and the tricky teenage terrain. In other words, the show is about friendship at that point in life when most of the filler reasons to be friends have evaporated. The show unravels without challenging this claim but as Radhika, Suman and Avi keep meeting at parks in the morning with their kids and at bus stops at night like they used to when they were kids, the crux of friendship reveals itself: it helps one remember who they were when the present versions of them are in constant flux. By the end of eight episodes, Raat Jawaan Hain culminates into a rare show that affirms that one remains a friend by choosing to be one on good and bad days, despite the banality and replaceability.