Benediction of a pig's head

How does one talk about diaspora, parental expectations, body issues, identity, patriarchy, racism and love (brotherly, romantic and self-obsessed - choose your flavor) without going either the sermonizing, sniffling, heaviness route or The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh out and out comedy route? You get your counsel from a pig's head, that's how.

Ten years ago, when Riz was Naz, we had chanced on this gem - The night of - on HBO. On the face it was a crime thriller. But what kept us glued was the immigrant experience and how it forges its alliances of necessity with the underbelly of the host. In Bait, with Riz as Shah, he doesn't need a dead body anymore to tell a similar story. He resorts to humor, now being also the creator of the show, with visibly more confidence. Shah Jahan, a Paki-Brit and a struggling actor, chances upon an audition for the next Bond and this upends his life. The humor is tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating and absurd.

In the show we hear Sir Patrick Stewart talking to Shah as a life coach through this severed pig's head, an evidence of a hate crime, that Shah is lugging around with him across London, and an entire catharsis happens in the thick of real action. I am reminded of a short story I read as a part of my high school curriculum. There, an enterprising man is able to get inside the belly of a giant crocodile and retrieve a cache of jewelry, but the story is about much more. Written in the late nineteenth century, Trailakya Nath Mukhopadhyay had given Bengali literature something it did not have yet - udvata rasa - or humor of the absurd kind. This is not magic-realism; there is no fine blending of the edges. But it is a lot of fun, and a masterclass in how a heavy material could be lightened up without diluting it.