Urban Folklore, Male Fantasy
Fairy Folk opens with Mohit (Mukul Chadda) and Ritika (Rasika Dugal) stranded with a sputtering car in Aarey colony, Mumbai’s very own middle-of-nowhere land. The ‘creature’ appears on the dark road, a cheeky nod to Aarey’s assortment of urban legends over the years (my favourite is the ghostly woman in a white sari who scares the living daylights out of motorists). Even in their panicked exchanges, it’s clear that Mohit and Ritika are the kind of couple who know each other too well to sustain their romantic chemistry – it’s the awkward sibling-like phase where familiarity breeds (too much) contentment. Once the fairy follows them home, the absurdity of their circumstances is blunted by the domesticity of their life. Mohit starts to bond with the subservient being, the way an idle man with a breadwinning wife might take to a pet or an artificial-intelligence toy. His dormant masculinity finds an outlet: Mohit ‘trains’ the fairy to be a server at house parties, takes it shopping, feeds and teaches it, and subconsciously shapes it to fit the male fantasy of an ideal partner.
Ironically, Mohit’s final frontier – physical affection – becomes his undoing. A drunken peck on the lips leads them to discover that this genderless being can transform into a new human, but with the soul and memories of the person it’s attached to. As a result, Mohit’s ‘mistake’ triggers the arrival of Kabir (Chandrachoor Rai), a perfect cocktail of newness and recognition for Ritika, who pushes for a fresh living arrangement. By shacking up with Kabir, she is at once with another man and her husband – the marriage feels both open and closed. Of course Mohit feels left out and engineers the arrival of an alternate Ritika, who, much to his chagrin, isn’t what he hoped for. She is a woman, but in a man’s body: They name her Vikrant, but she changes it to Hansa (“swan”). This is a deal-breaker for Mohit; he wishes for an early-relationship Ritika in female form, but gets stuck with Hansa, a familiar stranger he reluctantly bonds with.