Integritus Prime

We watched Mrs. Deshpande (Hotstar) recently, and it was gripping because of the mystery surrounding the identity of the serial killer. It is adapted from a 2017 French series called La Mante.

Spoilers start here as I summarize the plot. Mrs. Deshpande or Zeenat, played by Madhuri Dixit, has served time in Hyderabad Jail for 25 years when we are introduced to her. She is a serial killer. Arun (Priyanshu Chatterji) is Commissioner of Police, and he brings Mrs. Deshpande in to help with a copycat serial killer in Mumbai. Arun assigns ACP Tejus Phadke (Siddharth Chandekar) to the case and they begin working. The series is held together by Madhuri’s creepy and excellent performance. She is quite real as a serial killer. Despite what seemed to be the ineptitude of the Mumbai police, the plot moved along, with their attempts to identify the copycat.

Madhuri’s history is slowly revealed through flashbacks. She ran a restaurant, and loves cooking, so she requests permission from the police to cook in the safehouse she is kept in while working on the case. She feeds the idiot cops some special mushrooms in her modaks (Indian sweet), and runs away, seeking someone, for whom she waits all night. That person does not appear, so she goes to visit Tejus’ wife, Tanvi.

In a dramatic twist, it is revealed that Mrs. Deshpande is Tejus’ mother, and this secret was kept by Arun and Tejus’ grandfather, Mrs. Deshpande’s father, Azoba.

Slowly, the viewer notices hints from Mrs. Deshpande that she chose her killers based on their evil deeds. We see through a flashback that she killed a man who tried to rape her. It was self-defense. Azoba helped her hide the body.

Later, we see that Mrs. Deshpande notices a father who is mean to his son, and she looks closely at the child’s bruises. She kills that man later, and the boy watches.

That boy, Suhas, is now a trans woman called Divya, and she is the present day Mumbai copycat serial killer. She worships Mrs. Deshpande, who liberated Divya from abuse. Divya, however, now kills those who romantically rejected her, including her first love, who beat her violently once learning that she is a trans woman. Divya learns how Mrs. Deshpande killed through her file, which she receives in her IT job as part of a digitization project. A lot of holes here in the story, around data confidentiality, and more. However, through Mrs. Deshpande’s help, the police find Divya.

Divya takes a bullet to help Mrs. Deshpande escape. Tejus, who is now more and more sympathetic to his mother, finds a file in Divya’s home, through which he learns that his mother was sexually abused by her father, Azoba.

Through a pivotal flashback, and the final and powerful twist in the story, we learn that Mrs. Deshpande was repeatedly raped by her father, Azoba. He is a pedophile.

At the very moment that Tejus is finding this out, Mrs. Deshpande has found Azoba at home, and you see her rage when she confronts her father. The rage that led her to become a serial killer of child abusers.

When Tejus arrives at Azoba’s residence, Mrs. Deshpande is strangling her father using her signature neon yellow rope. Tejus is livid. He wants to shoot Azoba. Mrs. Deshpande stops Tejus. As they focus on each other and she calms Tejus, Azoba jumps off of his balcony, killing himself.

The series ends with a huge revelation and the immense heaviness of what Mrs. Deshpande endured. Repeated sexual abuse by her father led her to begin killing perpetrators. In the last scene, Tejus is driving his mother back to jail, with one escort vehicle which is (nonsensically) in front of them, and he swerves onto a side road.

By the time the security escort finds Tejus, he is handcuffed to the wheel, and Mrs. Deshpande has escaped in a bus. It’s (purposefully?) unclear whether Tejus helped his mother escape, or if she outsmarted him.

I suspect a sequel could be made, and perhaps in that, we might learn if there ever was a Mr. Deshpande, or if Azoba (horrifyingly) is Tejus’ biological father.

It was hard not to be triggered while watching the final episode. If anything, it was a reminder that all serial killers come from severe child abuse of some kind. And, the perplexity of not knowing whether Mrs. Deshpande could ever be trusted…her creepiness and charm, they all point to classic narcissistic tendencies. And yet through her masterful performance, Madhuri grips the viewer from start to finish.

Such is the conundrum of trauma: abuse gets mixed up with love, and we get lost in that mix.