Delhi Crime: This seven-part digital series is too close for comfort

Richie Mehta and Shefali Shah. Pic/Getty images

On December 16, 2012, Canadian writer-director Richie Mehta was visiting Delhi, working on an independent production Siddharth, as the Nirbhaya gang-rape case snowballed into a national headline, shocking citizens - the Capital's young in particular - enough to hit the streets, protest, and collectively wonder aloud. What the hell just happened!

A few days later, while confirmations on the severity of the crime had settled in, Mehta met a family friend, recently retired police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, who was familiar with his work, and asked if he might want to follow the thread of that story for a film.

"The incident was too fresh at the moment to look at it as a film," Mehta thought. Kumar essentially asked him to read the court's verdict that was just out. He did. And that set in motion a four-year journey of intense research, of what's become Delhi Crime, a seven-part, six hours plus Netflix series (that dropped this weekend, and premiered at Sundance this year), shot over 62 days, detailing, almost in real time, simply five days following the staggering crime.

Five days is how long it took Delhi Police to nab those six culprits - akin to finding a needle in a haystack - who were on that white, private bus, on the road, when a woman and her male friend unsuspectingly boarded it, returning home from a movie one random night.

Since his late teens, Mehta, born and raised in Toronto, has been spending almost half a year in Delhi (where his mother is from), working on films, that he says, have centred on the city. This is important to know, because for anyone familiar with the Nirbhaya incident - even reading journalistic accounts of which can jolt you out of your senses - the series on it, first scene onwards, although extremely sensitive and subtle in its depiction, hits you hard. 'Bahot hard'. Too frickin' close for comfort, really.

Did the fact that Mehta is still not from Delhi per se equip him to be able to tell one of the city's most brutal crime stories, with relative dispassion/distance? Perhaps, he agrees, since the city isn't necessarily ingrained in his DNA, and he isn't so aware of "the fabric of what it's like growing up in an urban Indian environment." But the series itself, it has to be said, is as much discovery of Delhi, more so how it is policed, for any viewer - whether or not they've ever lived in the Capital.

At the heart of the script is an incredible man-hunt, and a striking police procedural, centred on a deputy police commissioner (DCP), played to perfection by Shefali Shah (Satya, Monsoon Wedding: arguably one of India's most under-rated actors). She leads a team of top-notch investigators. Shah's part is modelled on IPS officer, DCP (South) at the time, Chhaya Sharma.

Over coffee that lasted a few hours, Shah recalls having met and interviewed Sharma on the minutest details of her job, down to the books on her desk, or what she scribbles on her workbook/diary. She came away "having met one helluva woman - at once a caring mom, and a kickass officer." What Shah found peculiar about Sharma was that while the incident had incited rage and pain across, as an officer, she could channel all that energy into the investigation/man-hunt alone: "She could block out (emotions), knowing that if she falters, her team would break down." You can sense all of this in Shah as the deeply restrained, yet expressive, DCP Vartika Chaturvedi on screen.

Although wholly character-driven (rather than strong on plot), Ivan Ayr's Soni, that also recently dropped on Netflix, is an equally empathetic take on the workings/limitations of Delhi Police as a force. And while magnitudes of the two crimes can't be compared, Black Friday, Anurag Kashyap's docu-drama on investigations behind 1993 Bombay blasts (which was also initially designed as a series) is perhaps the Indian film that comes closest to Delhi Crime, as a painstakingly exhaustive police procedural.

For inspiration through, Mehta lists three films in particular: "One was [William Friedkin's] The French Connection, the Gene Hackman police procedural, from the '70s. The other was David Fincher's Zodiac (2007) - also a procedural, but which was as much about the serial-killer, as the social fabric of that environment. And then, [Paul Greengrass's] United 93 (2006), which staged events as they unfolded while blocking and shooting actors - again, in a very non-judgmental way."

You do especially sense a United 93 connection, given Delhi Crime's shooting style that, through seemingly natural lighting, pretty much places the viewer as a fly on the wall, while cops go about their day (and night), round-the-clock, sticking it out, without a home to go to, until the bloody job is done. The entire series, Mehta says, was shot with the camera placed on cinematographer Johan Huerlin Aidt's shoulders: "He is in the room as a bystander, so we take his point of view (POV) in every scene, as if you (the viewer) are standing there."

The larger POV in Delhi Crime however is entirely the police's, which was in fact Mehta's primary impetus to script the series in the first place. And that he intended as a feature first. He says, "When I played it [the script] out as a film-plot, it just became a series of happenings - this happened, this happened. It was dry and empirical - a cold document - with no characters in it. I had to bring more life into it. When I did that, it (the script) just grew in a way. I also needed to know these characters, without losing thread of the main man-hunt, which you wouldn't have time for in a feature."

You can instantly sense the script emerging as Mehta recounts his conversations with cops, which straight off translate into scenes on the show. For instance, he asked an Investigating Officer (IO) - who only deals in heinous crimes like gang-rapes etc - about what keeps her up, or haunts her at night. She said, "The fact that my daughter, who wants to study abroad, may never come back." Likewise, Mehta came across an officer struggling to find a groom for his daughter, because most prospective families would rather not associate with cops: "Inse dosti ya dushmani, dono buri."

But the final trigger for Mehta to devote four years on a story that everyone already knows was actually an optimistic one. While being narrated a recent monstrous crime, he asked the IO if he still believed in people, after all that he had seen. "Of course," he said. He asked him why. The officer reasoned, "There are 17 million people in Delhi, 80,000 police officers, 45 per cent of them are on traffic, and VIP duty. So, 55 per cent of 80,000 are keeping peace, 24 hours a day. They can't stop a crime from being committed. There are too many people (in the city) for preventive-policing. We can merely detect and apprehend, if the circumstance is correct. So the only thing keeping peace is the people, 99.999 per cent are really good. We just deal with few thousand bad apples."

Strongly highlighting rotten apples, and their deeds, also might be a good way to protect against criminal history repeating itself. Public outrage over Nirbhaya in 2012 did just that. So does Delhi Crime.

Also read: Is Shefali Shah's son Aryaman Shah Bollywood ready?

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