Trial By Fire: It  Makes You Think Hard About Your Priorities

Trial By Fire(Netflix,7 Episodes)

Directed by Prashant Nair, Randeep Jha, Avani Nair

Rating: ****

This is  not a series. It is  a piece  of history regurgitated  into  a meticulously  re-designed  eyewitness account of  what happened on  13 June 1997 when Delhi’s  Uphaar cinema went up in flames extinguishing the joy and wellbeing of several families who lost their near and dear ones  in the  tragedy.

This series recreates  the  long and endless legal battle of  a couple  Shekhar and Neelam  Krishnamoorthy who lost both  children in  the  Uphaar cinema fire  while watching  J P Dutta’s Border.

The battle is  long . But the couple’s patience, especially Neelam’s , is  unlimited. This is  the story  of resilience determination and obstinacy , so real  so tangible  you can feel the  pain of the couple every step along their painful battle.It won’t be wrong to say the couple fought their own war as fiercely as  the soldiers seen  in  Border.

Rajshri Deshpande and  Abhay Deol are  pitch-perfect. The series creates  a credible ambience around the  couple. The time  leaps for eighteen years(yes, that’s how long the Krishnamoorthy’s legal battle has gone on) are achieved with the least  amount of fuss. Blessedly we don’t hear songs from every  phase in the couple’s legal battle  playing in the background.

  But yes, the anthemic song from J P Dutta’s Border does play a vital part in the  articulate  sound design…Or maybe  ‘design’ is not the  word I am looking for. Nothing in this  series seems designed. There is   flow of inevitability  about  the proceedings. Of course  this is all preordained since it is a scrupulous recreation  of   actual facts. But the series  never feels it is indebted to facts. Rather, facts  flow freely and fluently into storytelling.

 Even the fictional moments(like the electrician Veer Singh played Rajesh Tailang and his  wife Sarla, played  by Kiran  Sharma,  having frantic sex  after he  returns  home from prison, or a  gay couple holding hands at the  catastrophic  first-day screening  of Border) seem to be intimately interwoven  into the  plot.

 On the  minus  side: too many characters which are either  ill-formed  or  dangerously sidestepped . Neelam and  Shekhar’s neighbour played  by  Shilpa  Shukla is  around for no particular reason. Anupam Kher and Ratna  Pathak Shah as a  retired army officer  and his  wife struggle to make their presence felt.

Many capable actors like Ashish Vidyarthi, Nimisha  Nair, Shardul Bhardwaj,  and Siddharth Bhardwaj  try hard to justify their presence  in the plot. But this is really not  about them. It is  about  the Krishnamoorthys , and  Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol are as credible  as any two capable actors can get given the  tragic  circumstances.