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Chumbak Review: Neena Gupta and Deven Bhojani anchor Netflix’s madcap colony comedy as divorce, dementia, infidelity and relentless neighbours collide in Chembur.
Chumbak ensemble cast brings together Neena Gupta, Deven Bhojani, Sumeet Vyas, Manasi Parekh, Helly Shah and Arjun Bijlani.
ChumbakU
3/5
Starring: Neena Gupta, Deven Bhojani, Sumeet Vyas, Manasi Parekh, Arjun Bijlani, Helly Shah, Sumeet Raghavan, Sandeepa Dhar, Anant Joshi, Amyra Dastur, Delnaaz Irani, Atul KumarDirector: Aatish Kapadia Platform: Netflix
There comes a point in Chumbak when all the neighbourhood chatter, unsolicited counselling and domestic reconnaissance suddenly recede, and a woman quietly asks for something that sounds almost scandalous in its simplicity: a portion of her life that belongs only to her. It is a surprisingly sore note for a comedy otherwise addicted to commotion. Written and directed by Aatish Kapadia, with JD Majethia producing under Hats Off Productions, Netflix’s Chumbak, with 8 of its total 16 episodes released and the remaining episodes set to arrive at a later date, gathers an enviable cast inside one Mumbai colony and permits everybody to trespass into everybody else’s business. Sometimes the resulting chaos is irresistible. Sometimes it stretches a gag until the elastic snaps. Yet beneath the noise sits enough affection, melancholy and lived-in irritation to make these people difficult to dismiss completely.
The pin on the map is Chumbak Colony in Chembur, Mumbai, where five families live in attractive row houses separated by walls that appear to have no jurisdiction whatsoever. Privacy here is less a right than a temporary administrative oversight. Hutoxi Taraporewala, played by Amyra Dastur, ushers us into this circus through a reading from her book, The Chumbak Chapters. An aspiring author, Hutoxi has converted the collective history of the colony into prose, which means every embarrassing episode has already survived long enough to become literature.
It is an amusing framing device because Chumbak understands one useful truth about tightly packed communities: the only creature more dangerous than a gossiping neighbour is a writer who lives close enough to take notes. Gossip may distort. Writers preserve.
At the centre of this gathering storm is Rajni Merchant, played by Neena Gupta, who announces that she wants to divorce her husband Kuku. Kuku, a former pilot played by Deven Bhojani, is living with dementia, and his condition has gradually transformed their marriage into a pattern of supervision, repetition and responsibility. Rajni has spent years arranging her days around the requirements of other people. Now, with whatever stretch of life remains before her, she wants some jurisdiction over herself.
Naturally, the colony treats this deeply personal decision as a public emergency. Before long, neighbours assemble with the urgency of an unofficial matrimonial tribunal, determined to diagnose, debate and preferably reverse Rajni’s decision. The irony is sitting comfortably in every drawing room around them. These are people arriving to repair somebody else’s marriage while carrying enough cracks in their own to keep an entire civil engineering department occupied.
Gupta is the series’ most reliable emotional compass. She refuses to make Rajni’s frustration decorative. There are no grand declarations every time the character feels cornered, no insistence that every ache must become a monologue. Rajni is tired in the specific manner of somebody who has been useful for too long. Even her resentment remains contaminated by concern. She can crave distance from Kuku and still worry about whether he has eaten. She can love him and still recognise that love has become entangled with labour.
That contradiction gives the character her depth. Deven Bhojani, meanwhile, ensures Kuku never becomes merely a delivery mechanism for jokes about forgetfulness. There is an almost childlike vulnerability to him without infantilising the character altogether. Kuku can be funny, exasperating, tender and terribly lost, sometimes within the same interaction. Gupta and Bhojani understand that the painful part of Rajni and Kuku’s marriage is precisely that nobody has stopped caring. Love is still there. It has simply become impossible to separate from duty.
Their scenes give Chumbak a sturdier emotional spine than its collection of comic set pieces might initially suggest. The writing itself does not always handle Kuku’s condition with comparable delicacy. His memory lapses repeatedly become convenient launchpads for misunderstanding, and the show occasionally slips into an uneasy zone where dementia is both a serious burden in one scene and a handy sitcom contraption in another. The tonal negotiation is not always graceful.
Rajni’s insistence that she would continue looking after Kuku even after divorcing him opens an intriguing question about what separation might actually mean when affection and caregiving remain intact. Unfortunately, the screenplay prefers the emotional proposition to the logistical one. Their son lives abroad, the family appears financially comfortable, yet professional assistance and other possible caregiving arrangements receive surprisingly little attention. Chumbak identifies the exhausting architecture of care but often walks around the harder practical corridors that architecture creates.
Outside the Merchant household, the colony grows steadily louder. Manasi Parekh and Sumeet Vyas inhabit one of its liveliest marriages. Parekh plays Priyanka Khanna, a woman capable of occupying a conversation before anybody else has properly entered it. Her husband Aditya, played by Vyas, has evidently developed the survival skills of a diplomat stationed in permanently hostile territory. He does not so much interrupt his wife as wait for weather conditions to improve.
Parekh attacks Priyanka’s relentless verbosity with tremendous energy, while Vyas understands the comic value of giving almost nothing back. His silences acquire their own grammar. The imbalance works, particularly in the earlier episodes, but the writing becomes too dependent on Priyanka’s inability to let anybody finish a sentence. There are only so many variations available to a joke built around somebody saying, “You speak,” and then immediately continuing to speak herself. Parekh keeps finding flourishes, but eventually even a talented performer requires fresher ammunition.
Sumeet Raghavan enters the colony from another comic universe altogether as Dharmendra Kejriwal, a television performer whose habit of dressing as women for his professional roles has begun leaking spectacularly into domestic life. Raghavan possesses exactly the commitment such nonsense requires. Half-hearted absurdity is fatal, and he refuses to blink first.
His wife Kiran, a flight attendant played by Sandeepa Dhar, gives the pairing a comparatively grounded counter-rhythm. Their marriage becomes more interesting whenever the series moves beyond the visual gag of Dharmendra’s costumes and asks what constant performance does to somebody who no longer seems entirely capable of leaving the stage behind. Unfortunately, the outfits frequently become the destination rather than the doorway. They generate instant laughter, but the premise holds considerably more comic and emotional potential than another flamboyant entrance can supply.
Arjun Bijlani and Helly Shah bring an entirely different kind of disorder as surgeon Mickey Oberoi and his wife Twinkle. Their household runs on frivolity, deception and Twinkle’s gloriously delayed encounters with comprehension. Shah understands that stupidity is funniest when the performer never behaves as though she is playing stupid. Twinkle’s mind seems to travel towards conclusions by scenic route, and Shah can turn the moment something finally dawns on her into a miniature event.
Bijlani has a more precarious task. Mickey must remain enjoyable company even as his infidelities begin complicating the comedy around him. Added to this combustible household is Twinkle’s father Nari Ravjiani, a gangster played by Atul Kumar, whose dislike of Mickey gives ordinary family irritation the faint possibility of criminal consequence. A father-in-law being annoyed with his daughter’s husband is common enough. When the father-in-law happens to be a gangster, passive aggression acquires a considerably larger budget.
Then there are the Taraporewalas. Anant Vijay Joshi plays Freddy, a chef and caterer positioned between two formidable domestic forces: his wife Hutoxi and his mother Gulshan. Amyra Dastur and Delnaaz Irani approach their mutual irritation with gratifying appetite. Irani, especially, can inflate an everyday grievance until it sounds worthy of parliamentary inquiry. Their skirmishes over household matters have the familiar pettiness of people who have quarrelled often enough to maintain an archive.
At the same time, Chumbak occasionally falls back on an older school of comic shorthand while portraying the family. Exaggerated Parsi mannerisms do a fair amount of the heavy lifting, sometimes at the expense of sharper individual writing. The actors are entertaining enough to keep these scenes buoyant, but a little less dependence on recognisable community caricature and a little more curiosity about the people underneath would have made the household richer.
Kapadia fares considerably better whenever he allows absurdity to grow organically out of the colony’s social habits. One of the show’s funniest stretches arrives after the death of a pet python. Yes, a python.
The neighbours assemble to mourn, attempting to negotiate grief for a creature whose passing does not correspond to any social script they have previously rehearsed. Gulshan’s wildly inappropriate questions make the gathering funnier still. What sells the sequence is not simply the oddity of mourning a snake, but the complete sincerity with which everybody tries to behave appropriately while having absolutely no idea what appropriate behaviour might look like.
The cast treats the ceremony seriously enough for the ridiculousness to blossom on its own. Nobody points at the joke too aggressively. For once, Chumbak trusts the situation.
Other comic excursions suffer because the series does not know when to leave. A Bollywood-themed costume party eventually results in the women being mistaken for drug dealers, sending everybody into an increasingly overcrowded police-station farce. On paper, it is perfect Chumbak territory. Disguises, mistaken identities, escalating confusion and anxious spouses should provide plenty of combustible material.
The problem is duration. New entrances arrive. Fresh explanations are demanded. Another misunderstanding appears before the previous one has properly landed. The episode keeps adding rooms to a joke whose foundation has already started sinking. There is a moment in every farce when the doors must stop opening. Chumbak occasionally behaves like a cheerful dinner guest who has failed to notice the hosts stacking plates and turning off the lights.
This excess is partly the inevitable burden of managing such a large ensemble. Five households provide almost limitless opportunities for collisions, but they also create a narrative traffic jam. The screenplay darts from one family to another with admirable energy, though constant movement is not the same thing as progression. Some relationships remain combinations of recurring quirks rather than fully inhabited equations. Early episodes, in particular, are busy teaching us the operating instructions for each person: Priyanka talks endlessly, Twinkle understands belatedly, Dharmendra appears in costumes, Kuku forgets, Mickey gets himself into trouble.
Once those introductory mechanisms stop demanding attention, the colony becomes easier to enjoy. A later storyline involving the search for a missing child, for instance, channels everybody’s habitual interference towards an immediate purpose. Suddenly, the same neighbours who routinely invade one another’s lives have a legitimate reason to do so. Their nosiness becomes concern. The colony momentarily stops looking like a collection of comic specimens and begins resembling a community.
Visually, the series has the polished comfort expected of contemporary streaming sitcoms. The row houses are handsome, the interiors attractive and the colony possesses the slightly manicured warmth of a place one could imagine visiting without necessarily being able to afford living there. That affluence also cushions many of the programme’s problems. The characters’ anxieties remain largely insulated from the economic pressures that would radically alter similar circumstances elsewhere.
The background score generally knows when to retreat, allowing performances and dialogue to carry scenes. More irritating are the moments when the series underlines jokes that require no assistance whatsoever. A braying donkey sound effect used to signal foolishness is particularly unnecessary. When Helly Shah, Sumeet Vyas, Neena Gupta or Deven Bhojani have already communicated the comic beat through timing and expression, the audio equivalent of somebody elbowing you in the ribs feels less like enhancement and more like distrust.
A thornier problem arrives with Mickey’s infidelity. His attempts to conceal his indiscretions, along with the other men’s willingness to help him do so, fuel several sequences, including the jacuzzi technician confusion and the discovery of an abandoned swimsuit. Mechanically, the ingredients are tailor-made for bedroom farce. Morally, the laughter is harder to access.
There is an uncomfortable asymmetry here. Chumbak devotes considerable sympathy to Rajni’s dissatisfaction within marriage and asks us to take seriously her need for autonomy. Yet Mickey’s betrayal is frequently packaged as mischievous inconvenience, while his friends’ participation in keeping Twinkle ignorant is treated like male camaraderie.
A comedy does not need to drag every unfaithful husband before a moral tribunal. Nor must bad behaviour automatically attract punishment before the credits roll. But the series should understand the emotional cost of the joke it is constructing. At times, Chumbak appears far more interested in the ingenuity required to hide Mickey’s actions than in the woman from whom those actions are being hidden.
The presence of names associated with Sarabhai vs Sarabhai and Khichdi inevitably casts a long, affectionate shadow over proceedings. Those shows understood how eccentricity could become biography. Their characters were exaggerated, certainly, but their peculiarities acquired enough detail to feel inseparable from the people carrying them.
Chumbak clearly shares that appetite for theatrical personalities, overcrowded conversations and domestic absurdity. Its difficulty is scale. With so many households competing for oxygen, quirks can start functioning like name tags. Still, there remains something refreshing about encountering a broad, unabashedly performative ensemble comedy on streaming at a time when the form is often either aggressively slick or self-consciously ironic.
The question is whether these characters become companions before their habits become repetitions. Across the first eight episodes, the answer fluctuates.
Several threads remain unresolved, including Mickey’s escalating problems and the arrival of Ronit Roy, whose presence hints at the possibility of another romantic chapter for Rajni. The latter could significantly complicate the emotional logic of her rebellion. Is she seeking another relationship, or simply another version of herself? Can caregiving coexist with separation? Can companionship be rebuilt after marriage has exhausted its original shape?
Those questions are more compelling than several of the broader comic detours surrounding them. They also mean the available episodes stop before Chumbak can fully declare what kind of series it intends to become. A rambunctious neighbourhood sitcom? A comedy about middle-aged marriages? A study of caregiving hidden beneath farce? A collection of domestic absurdities held together by locality?
Perhaps it wants to be all four.
For the moment, the show benefits from being consumed with some distance between episodes. Watch too many together and familiar rhythms begin announcing themselves several beats before the joke arrives. In smaller portions, the colony’s overfamiliarity feels almost appropriate. These people are, after all, the kind of neighbours best encountered for tea rather than invited to stay indefinitely.
Chumbak ultimately earns affection without escaping frustration. Its cast is far too accomplished to allow the colony to become tedious for long, and whenever Neena Gupta and Deven Bhojani occupy the centre, the comedy acquires an ache that the louder storylines cannot manufacture. Around them are good performers searching, with varying success, for dimensions beyond the eccentricities assigned to their characters.
The series could benefit from sharper pruning, greater confidence in silence and a willingness to interrogate some of its comic assumptions instead of merely repeating them. Yet Rajni’s story leaves behind something genuinely potent.
Everybody in Chumbak Colony knows when she wakes, whom she visits, what her husband forgets and probably what she ordered for dinner. They possess encyclopaedic knowledge of one another’s routines. And still, when Rajni finally asks what remains of her own life, understanding her turns out to be harder than discussing her.
That contradiction contains the more daring version of Chumbak. The colony already has enough mouths. What it needs now are a few better listeners.
Quick Answers
Ask News18Created by Aatish Kapadia and produced by JD Majethia under Hats Off Productions, Chumbak follows five diverse families living in Chumbak Colony in Chembur, Mumbai. The story centers on Rajni Merchant, played by Neena Gupta, who decides she wants a divorce from her husband Kuku, a former pilot living with dementia, sparking endless interference from their eccentric neighbors.
Ask News18About the Author
Yatamanyu Narain is a Sub-Editor at News18.com with a passion for all things entertainment. Whether he\’s breaking the latest Bollywood news or chatting with rising stars in the OTT world, he’s always…Read More
September 19, 2026, 13:22 IST
