A little Dalit girl is murdered in Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, and her body is discovered floating in a village well. However, she somehow makes the indifference, the procedural immobility, the scornful shrugs, and the sidelong glances that follow seem more terrible and criminal. As is typically the case, the deceased victim is secondary. Instead, the emphasis is on how the system metabolizes tragedy and how the living react, bending around the unease of injustice. The main character is Santosh, a hesitant police constable who takes over her deceased husband’s position more as a means of avoiding her resentful in-laws’ disdain rather than out of civic obligation.
Santosh is portrayed by a fantastic Shahana Goswami with a tired, tautness that suggests she is still adjusting to the pressure of her new outfit. She is not an activist. All she needs is a place to live, a salary, and a means of escaping the abyss of widowhood. However, on her first day, she is thrust into a situation that is already unsolvable because the people in charge do not want to solve it. The police are disgustingly unconcerned and unconcerned, while the girl’s brutalized body rests on slabs of melting ice. At first, Santosh observes, listens, and learns the rules—just like any other sensible person would.
The revoltingly misogynistic police commissioner whose primary qualification for the job seems to be an unshakable belief in victim-blaming, is swiftly replaced by Inspector Geeta Sharma. Played by a tremendous Sunita Rajwar, Sharma carries an almost subliminal menace that makes you sit up a little straighter, the way you do when a teacher with a reputation walks into the room. She’s a pragmatist in the way only long-weathered bureaucrats can be.
Justice isn’t the goal but another smokescreen, a cog in the machine, and her job is to keep the damn thing running. Meanwhile, the greenhorn Santosh is treated like raw material, waiting to be shaped. Under Sharma’s watchful (and ever-so-salacious) eye, Santosh learns to savour the small, everyday pleasures of power. Goswami plays this slow corruption masterfully; her face is a study in barely perceptible shifts, flickers of hesitation giving way to steely resolve, the contours of her disillusionment settling in like a permanent shadow.
