What the Fish

It starts out breezy with some laugh-out-loud moments but gets clichéd pretty quickly

Though it strangles itself with too many characters, What the Fish starts off as a breezy film with a few laugh-out-loud moments. We go down the ‘Punjaban Delhi’ comedy trail with a story about a fish called ‘Mishti’. Senior citizen Sudha Mishra (Dimple Kapadia) is going out of town for a while and needs someone to feed her fish and water her money-plant. So she leaves her Vasant Kunj home in the charge of Sumit (Sumit Suri), the fiancé of her niece.

Though Sudha was apparently married at some point, we don’t actually see the husband, dead or alive. The fish is her focus. She baby-talks ‘Mishti’ and counts her spots, even as she harangues every creature of our own lesser species.

She leaves home, with strict instructions to Sumit on feeding frequency and water changes. But he is a fuzzy brained drifter who throws a wild party on the first day he is left alone. Thereafter, it’s open house for anyone who needs a place to ‘crash’.

Poor ‘Mishti’ is doomed. She is a friendly parrot fish, but every new resident at the house causes her sad demise, and then callously replaces her with an exact copy from the neighbourhood aquarium fish dealer. When Sudha returns, she senses that the spots don’t add up. How could they? This is the fourth avatar of Mishti.

Up to a point the film is funny, but the serial occupiers of the house get progressively vulgar and demented, and there are just too many of them. The upwardly mobile ‘Delhiwalla’ started off as an amusing character in Hindi cinema some years ago, but s/he has now become as caricatured as the tipsy Goan and the mad Parsi of earlier times.

The Sudha Mishra character is written as over-the-top, but Dimple Kapadia is a very fine actress who lets us understand that Sudha’s eccentricity is probably put on, a defence mechanism to hide her loneliness.

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Ajit Duara