Indian television, at least in its heyday, gave us memorable sleuths. By those carrot-chomping standards, recent streaming shows — a supposed playground of quirk and world creation — haven’t pitched up as assiduously. One outlier from last year was Vishal Bhardwaj’s Charlie Chopra & The Mystery Of Solang Valley, an elementary but charming series, with Wamiqa Gabbi as a funny, sweary Emily Trefusis. Now Kay Kay Menon, reteaming with his Ray director Srijit Mukherji, takes a crack at a classic figure.
Kay Kay essays a Bengali Sherlock Holmes in Mukherji’s new series, Shekhar Home (streaming on JioCinema). Set in the 1990s, in a sleepy fictitious town called Lonpur, the show adapts Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories but gives them a Bengali spin: “Ei to jibon, Kali da (such is life, Kali brother),” Shekhar tells a suspect, with a delicious drawl, in the opening episode. A cafe, likewise, is named ‘Khasha Blanca’.
“Home is a bona fide surname in Bengal,” Kay Kay asserts. “Our show is very Indian. It is set in the early 1990s, when we did not have computers or electronic devices. So detection becomes that much more interesting and physical in nature. The town itself is very sleepy, lazy. It takes you back to the time of Malgudi Days.”
A still from ‘Shekhar Home’
Kay Kay elects Jeremy Brett’s rendition of Sherlock Holmes on British TV as his favourite. Though he sports a deerstalker on the poster, Kay Kay wanted to approach the character from the inside out, and not build his performance around professional tics.
“I play the person and not the profession,” Kay Kay says. “How quickly can Shekhar use a prop? - that is not my focus. I can never fully grasp the intricacies of a job. But I can know a person, a human being. It’s a psychological process that we actors follow.”
Growing up, Kay Kay had zipped through Conan Doyle’s stories, along with Agatha Christie, The Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five. At that age, he says, a child’s mind is at its most imaginative, inquisitive. His habit of visualizing narratives in detail has lingered on in adulthood. “In fact, long after I’ve shot a scene, the image that stays with me is the one I had pictured in my mind when reading the script.” This happened often on Shekhar Home. “The production would tell me, “Remember the scene we shot at the market?”, but I would be thinking of something else”.
Kay Kay had once described himself as an ‘impressionist’ actor, a term traditionally used for paintings. He supplements it with a new term: ‘simulator’.
‘Shekhar Home’ adapts Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories but gives them a Bengali spin
“In modern flight simulators, the experience of flying a plane is so believable that the authorities have removed the so-called crash mode, since there have been cases of heart attacks. That’s my job as an actor, in similar likeness. My simulation of a character has to be that life-like.”
Kay Kay is one of those performers who always defers to the intelligence of an audience, even a Hindi film audience, submitting gestures and hints where others would lay it on thick. It’s a faith that has remained unsevered in his three decades of acting. In Sarkar (2005), there is a scene where his character, film financier Vishnu, stares on with lusty maleficence at a young starlet. Years later, a fan told Menon how searing an impression that scene made on them.
“I sincerely believe that audiences are intelligent. They might not be intellectual, but they are intelligent. They are leading life through various circumstances. If they are smart enough to navigate life, what is a film?”
Kay Kay has been enjoying his ongoing run on streaming. He appeared in The Great Indian Dysfunctional Family, the brilliant Farzi, two seasons of Special Ops, the crime saga Bambai Meri Jaan and the survival drama The Railway Men. He has what he calls a ‘glorified cameo’ in the forthcoming Citadel: Honey Bunny, fronted by Varun Dhawan and Samantha Ruth Prabhu. Another series, Murshid, releases later this month.
He’s been doing press more often, too. Before our interview, Menon politely completes a shoot with a ‘youth platform’, answering rapid-fires and dispensing advice for the Gen-Z. His Instagram page has 407k followers and 477 posts, mostly announcements and promos of his work, a few collaborations and festival wishes. It feels engaged but impersonal.
“Social media is a part and parcel of our lives nowadays,” Kay Kay concedes. “I normally come to promote my films and that’s about it. I have nothing against any tool or technology. It takes great creativity and skill to make a one-minute reel, for instance. But I don’t possess it.”
Kay Kay’s last film in theatres was the sports drama Love All (2023). He was once a superstar — alongside actors like Irrfan Khan and Manoj Bajpayee — of a certain alternate cinema that would routinely release in cinemas. Today, that space, it seems, has gone entirely to streaming.
“All through my career, I have found phases where this kind of content cinema ‘threatens’ to become big. It never happens,” laughs Kay Kay.
He puts it down to the cinema-viewing public’s need for larger-than-life entertainment. “Blockbusters are the game in India. I have realised that you cannot take it away from the audience. They want the buffet, not one nutritious meal.”
Shekhar Home is streaming on JioCinema
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