Missing in action

The mystery of a missing wife and two lead actors pitted against each other. It does not take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out who is the guilty party here. In case it is, refer to ‘Khoj’, the Rishi Kapoor-starrer which was released in 1989.

The predictability element is the undoing for any thriller, but in ‘Khoj — Parchaiyon Ke Uss Paar’, an entire police station adopts such an unconventional method and goes to such great lengths to solve the mystery that it defies logic, specially because we are a country where the police-public ratio is 152 police personnel for a population of one lakh.

This seven-episode series begins with a distressed Ved (Sharib Hashmi) arriving at the police station in Panchgani to lodge a missing person’s report about his wife, Meera.

While the police start investigating, a lady (Anupriya Goenka) turns up at his house claiming to be his wife. Ved insists that he doesn’t recognise her but everyone in his family, including his daughter and sister-in-law Aditi (Kriti Garg), claims that it is her.

Ved, a lawyer by profession, applies all his ammo to prove that the lady living in his house as his wife is an imposter, including a DNA test. That makes us wonder, why didn’t the makers consider running an Aadhaar check, when a person’s true identity can be established by scanning a person’s finger or iris? Maybe they wanted to stay true to the original ‘Khoj’. But then, times have changed and so has technology. This is an era of catfishing, not impersonation in physical form, that too as a wife!

Anyway, while the DNA report takes a long time to come and a private detective employed by Ved who seems to be on the right trail goes missing too, we are made to endure the tedious process of Ved trying to get rid of the imposter and the entire town conspiring against him to make him a mental health patient. No, he does not think of going for a second opinion, but just falls into the trap laid for him.

This story is oh-so-yesteryear that even both the suspect and the investigator look confused and disinterested. Hashmi and Goenka are good actors, but even they cannot keep this ‘Khoj’ engaging.