Jyotika, Anjali Anand, Shalini Pandey, Shabana Azmi, Nimisha Sajayan in ‘Dabba Cartel’
| Photo Credit: Netflix

Shabana Azmi is the fiery queenpin of a female outfit. They ply a disreputable trade. Her underlings feel the heat of her glare. She suffers no fools. I’m talking, of course, about a film called Mandi, directed by the late, great Shyam Benegal and released in 1983. Its coolness remains unsurpassed, 42 years on.

Dabba Cartel, a new Netflix crime series with Azmi again at the helm, tries its best to be cool. Co-created by Shibani Akhtar, the show has a novel core: a home chef’s dabba (tiffin) delivery business spirals into a perilous drug operation. The pin-balling narrative is tugged along over seven episodes. The characters are stock, but, coming at you in numbers, they keep up a busy rhythm, like players on a revolving stage. It has the mark of an Excel production: ample efficiency, not a lot of excellence.

I am convinced an early draft of Dabba Cartel was called Ba, Bahu Aur Bandook. Retired criminal Sheila (Shabana Azmi) espies her daughter-in-law, Raji (Shalini Pandey), making a sly windfall. She tracks her to a ratty apartment where Raji, her business partner and housemaid Mala (Nimisha Sajayan), and another cohort, mid-level property broker Shahida (Anjali Anand), are being held at gunpoint. Sheila, unperturbed, cuts a deal with the blackmailers: Raji will continue her clandestine ‘puriya’ business. Except, in place of marijuana or sexual-wellness herbs, they’ll peddle molly. “Drugs drugs,” says Raji, startled.

The stakes only ratchet up from this point. Linking the multiple threads, at the show’s centre, are two flailing marriages. Raji’s husband, Pharma sector employee Hari (Bhupendra Jadawat), is desperate for an overseas posting. He is advised to petition a superior, Shankar (Jisshu Sengupta), who’s busy covering up an opioid scandal. Shankar is emotionally distanced from his partner, Varuna (Jyotika), owner of a struggling boutique firm. This is a story of wives, mothers and ignored female professionals reclaiming control of their lives, while the men brown-nose and bicker. The hard, stratified world is leavened with comic sass—Nimisha Sajayan, as the constantly hustling and combustible Mala, is especially a treat.

Plausibility is rarely a concern in shows like Dabba Cartel. A truly great crime show thrives on contrast: In Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, for instance, it’s the collision between ordinary New Mexico and the cartel lands that loom across the border. Dabba Cartel plays by the rules of American TV—”I enjoyed it, it was exciting, I felt like I was alive again,” Sheila confesses, practically quoting Walter White—but it misses this one, crucial trick. Middle-class, Maharashtrian Thane is an admittedly fun setting for a crime series led by women. However, the drab world of Big Pharma, with its sterile offices and corruption scams, is rarely as fun to watch. Detours to Amritsar, Delhi, and Pune do not help. Even Gajraj Rao’s wig—he plays a drug enforcement officer—gets boring after a point.

I wish Dabba Cartel was as consistently funny as 2022’s Darlings (also streaming on Netflix). Director Hitesh Bhatia shows some feeling for Mumbai: the incessant rains, the overweening neighbours, a TV set too large for the room. It’s a city ultimately of facades: not just Sheila and Raji, even an established gangster uses a motor training school as a front. But the writing is also lazy and uninspiring in parts. ‘Bhowmick Bose’ is a depressingly generic name for a Bengali whistle-blower, and my heart bleeds for any newspaper that would call itself, in all seriousness, ‘The Front Page’.

In an early scene, we watch Sheila as she watches a stranger, who, in turn, is being watched by cops. It telegraphes the steely vigilance the character will exude throughout. Azmi commits to this chess-not-checkers attitude, keeping clear of any superfluous badassery. Jyotika and Sajayan work up a spiky rapport. In such exalted company, Shalini Pandey, an actor with an already limited repertoire, looks even more constrained.

Like the characters in the show, Indian streaming seems to be going around in circles, despite the gains of Black Warrantand Paatal Lok. When Sheila comes clean about her past in the third episode, confiding she used to work for a crime boss named ‘Sultan Mirza’, my mind flashed back to Azmi in her prime, working with the dons and dames of alternative cinema, directors like Benegal and Saeed Akhtar Mirza and Sai Paranjpye. They cooked the really good stuff, you know.