In SonyLIV series Salt City, toxic masculinity turns family bonds corrosive

Around 24 years ago the Bajpai family relocated from Lucknow to Mumbai, yet every time the going gets tough, the head of the family recalls and craves a simpler life left behind.

Harish Bajpai (Piyush Mishra) is patriarchal, hypocritical, unreasonable and insensitive. He treats his wife Triveni (Navni Parihar) like an appendage. He has scant respect for his three sons while his daughter and niece are a responsibility only until they are married off. The middle-class family in director Rishabh Anupam Sahay’s seven-part drama (on SonyLIV) is a rudimentary tableau.

The older Bajpai boys Aman (Manish Anand) and Nikhil (Pranay Pachauri) have moved out to upscale their lives and chase ambitions. The daughter Esha (Eisha Chopra) is married to a financially successful businessman. The youngest son Saurabh is dismissed by the elder brothers and treated the way her evil stepsisters treated Cinderella. Aman’s wife Gunjan (Gauahar Khan) is an intelligent woman who channels her feminine guile into manipulating those around her, either by teasing their insecurities or tantalising them. Daughter Eisha’s husband Sukesh (Jitin Gulati) is a predator whose behaviour goes unnoticed by an awed family that regards him as their moneybags saviour.

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Saurabh (Divyendu Sharma), the youngest, makes a string of poor judgement calls that jeopardise his own, as well as his cousin Ela’s (Monica Chaudhary) future. Harish Bajpai blames the humidity, the salt in the city air, for corroding everything, from the mind to the family. He takes scant note of his own contribution to their dysfunction. Secrets and lies hover uncomfortably during family get-togethers, including Harish’s double life, Ela’s fears, Eisha’s unhappiness, Aman’s frustrations, Nikhil’s debts, Gunjan’s kinks and need for control and Saurabh’s shenanigans.

Besides Saurabh’s journey, the writing does not flesh out the other characters enough for the viewer to invest in them. Divyendu Sharma works hard to give an additional dimension to the part of a young man who loses all his self-confidence when it matters most. The moments between Ela and Saurabh are the most authentic with Chaudhary quietly playing a troubled girl. Gauahar Khan crackles as the mercurial woman who wants to be seen in a world run by men. Toxic masculinity is, in fact, more corrosive than the salt in the city air.

This is as much as you learn about these characters. Questions remain, such as why the older brothers dislike their youngest sibling so much, why Aman is so cold and distant, and Gunjan so rapacious. The fault in Salt City is the sketchy presentation of its characters and their compulsions.

Salt City is streaming on SonyLIV

Udita Jhunjhunwala is a writer, film critic, and festival programmer.

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