Trash fabulous

Illustration/Uday Mohite

If you are part of a college or school girl friends WhatsApp group, you may quickly recognise the shape of Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives (FLBW).

Such WhatsApp groups mirror conventional real-life groups. There are alphas who drive and dominate the dynamics. They enforce a nostalgia which covertly maintains old group hierarchies. They decide who will be fussed over or centralised and who will be iced out or scapegoated through sudden offence. Some silent, resentful sufferers neither leave nor wholeheartedly participate in the group. And then there's an outlier--someone of the old group who is not in the WhatsApp group. That person might have been a freelance friend - a loner, non-belonger who partakes of many group friendships, without wholly belonging to one; a misfit who later becomes magnificent. Such people will at once be considered too good for the group, and also "who does she think she is" by the group. Yaniki, Shalini Passi.

In episode 1, the staggeringly wealthy Shalini Passi manifests as the host of an artsy ball, ostensibly dressed as Cleopatra, but all drag lovers belieeeeeve it's really Cher. She scatters hilarious bon mots - "I don't hold grudges, because it's bad for my skin", revels in her own unhinged eccentricities, off-key singing and numerous costume changes.

Shalini Passi moves the show's central preoccupation with social capital forward through a refined artifice. In an early episode, Riddhima Kapoor asks her if she is "the joker of the pack". That, is in fact, her assigned role - The Fool, the jester, the bahurupiya who destablises the story by showing it a mirror, who queers the pitch. She comes off as homey while dripping Schiaparelli. Her ornamental earnestness, her kooky zen, both sincere and crafted, protects and projects, masterfully dissing everyone. She drinks champagne with a straw because "unlike my other friends my teeth don't have veneer, these are my real teeth" (no word on her oft-noted bosoms though). With her biggest diss, "don't you have anything better to do than dissect each other?", she participates in the game by claiming not to play it, an insider taking the role of outsider. Throwing the others off their game, she give Seema, more Bollywood divorcee than wife, a little spirit versus the more insider insiders, dulling their Bolly-brag sheen. Passi makes them passe #sorrynotsorry. Muddling expectations with irresistible charm, Shalini Passi is a posh Rakhi Sawant (the one and only). Is there a greater act of performativity and camp to follow (and appropriate)? Orry can but hope.

FLBW has always been preoccupied with the nepotism accusation. "Every insider was once an outsider," intones Bhavana. Shalini's presence makes the wives seem paavam, as if to prove that Bollywood people are not as insider as all that. But compared to whom? We all have our crosses to bear. Some of us just get ours from Dolce.

The show closes with Saif Ali Khan, the thinking woman's once-crumpet, bearer of multiple social capitals, reading from A Tale of Two Cities, a whole other level of camp. Later, Seema's son complains about her moving house. "We have grown up in Bandra, we can't now… MIGRATE to Worli!" he declares, reminding us of the sweet provinciality of this cosmopolitan city, the innocent insularity of an older outsider Bollywood. You do not need Delhi to tell a tale of two cities, but who wants that much reality on TV.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com