Dr Arora review: A brilliant Kumud Mishra leads a fascinating little journey into small-town India’s bedroom

In a scene from SonyLiv’s Dr Arora, the doctor played by Kumud Mishra, asks a chatty patient of his “Kitne partner hain, ek ya kayi?”. Arora is visibly angry, almost let down by a seemingly modern – trouser wearing- woman in a corner of UP. “Sabko who nahi milta jo unhe chahiye hota hai,” the girl says, disappointed that a doctor who she’d expect to be more supportive is anything but. Dr Arora, created by Imtiaz Ali, is a series set in the 90s that deals with sex as taboo. We all passed to hairy ads painted in words on obscure walls hugging the highways in those years, but here we finally get a glimpse of the inside. Dr Arora, though uneven, is a welcome evaluation of the many barricades India has had to cross to be able to talk about sex, please and its many fallouts. The point is that the series, though set in 1999, is still as relevant today.

Kumud Mishra plays Dr Arora, a roving, almost stealth doctor of sexual problems. He functions like a spy, taking obscure trains, hiding behind shanties, and on the odd occasion also wearing the odd burqa to sneak into an illustrious personality’s house. Mishra is stunningly authentic as a matter-of-fact person carrying the burden of his own little underwhelming parts. The flashbacks that establish Arora’s own brush with erectile dysfunction is rather warmly put together as a place of nostalgia. It’s probably the effects of OTT that Arora’s life, his history, his personal reservations are all part of the narrative that propels India, collectively, towards a dawn of empathy. This empathy, however, is not some ground-roots movement as many films portray small-town India to be. It’s a personal, intimate exfoliation of information and knowledge, love and care.

Sex is taboo, and Dr Arora arrives as that point by a neat concoction of the many libidos fighting for space within the series. A young man who fails his first test of libido fumbles his way to an erotic awakening when a curious Bhabhi moves in next door. A stubborn police DSP struggles to perform for his wife’s sake. A young boy, heir to a journalistic institution, discovers the pleasures of masturbation. There is exploration, familial demands and illicit affairs all thrown into this bittersweet mix of love and performative nightmares. A local baba consults the doctor for he is being used, quite literally, as a sexual tool for the propagation of his message. It’s a hilarious situation, that really, could have been better written and acted.

Speaking of the writing, Imtiaz Ali has a thing for explicitness and the country’s harsh corners, and he displayed with Netflix’s SHE, he is on a curious streak of merging the scandalous with the meaningful. Dr Arora is far better than the former for it has in Mishra, a knock-out actor who somehow manages to play both isolation and responsibility with the umpteen ease of a man unbuttoning his shirt at the end of the day. Mishra stays with you even after the show ends for his pathos, his ability to create moments out of nothingness is staggering. In one scene he pitches up in the night in front of his former wife’s house. He doesn’t say anything, but just folds his arms and leaves. It’s a bafflingly affecting moment, surmised not by the lack of physicality employed but the restraint and emotion served to the character up to that point. Dr Arora is watchable and memorable for this performance alone.

What Dr Arora gets right is the tone and rugged mores of UP, casually travelling between its small towns, addressing hesitance and taboo, wrapped in a neat little bun of cultural sophistication and social anxieties. In one sequence from the show the wife of a celebrated civil officer asks the doctor to meet in a sari shop – to avoid the doubts of onlookers. It’s a bewitching sequence that unearths the underbelly for its knotted complications. India’s sexual graduation couldn’t have all happened at once because it is still an excruciatingly troubling process. It cannot be uncorked in one go, because it’s never been as simple as being bottled. It is instead a mesh of broken, sophisticated often incurable little threads. Masculinity is only one part of it.

The only problem with Dr Arora, is that it often seems unclear with the tone it must take. There are clear hat-tips here to eroticism, exemplified by the objectification of good-looking Bhabhi, but it’s never clear if the series wants us to take things in a lighter vein, or side with Dr Arora’s self-serious view of the world. The two can often be at odds, and herein lies a dilemma of sorts. The other, though not as big, issue is the show’s tendency to talk down to its audience, sterilise its language to use ling and yoni and not the million other words that people use. But then that is creative challenge too. All of this might seem odd because we’ve never really seen anything like this, and rarely have we imagined how people were tackling problems that were taboo back in the 90s. In fact, we probably did not even think they were problems. At least here is a flashback to that moment of awkward reckonings. It’s only better because Kumud Mishra is taking us there.

The author writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Views expressed are personal.

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