Rating: ****

Khauf directed by the duo Pankaj Kumar and Surya Balakrishnan, tells us in eight episodes things about life for single girls in Delhi that we may not enjoy hearing; but we, nevertheless need to know how girls are jostled sexually in public places.

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In Khauf, the borderlines of decent behaviour are crossed frequently. A  bunch of girls have locked themselves away in the dingiest hostel seen since man invented these travesties of architecture to keep women ‘safe’ from harm.

Turns out the women in Khauf are threatened by those very men who design fortresses for women. The women trapped in the hostel are plucky fighters. They rally together to fight a supernatural threat: a young man who barges into their New Year celebration and tells them what he would like to do to them with an iron rod.

Nirbhaya’s soul stirs the hosteliers. The oldest woman of the group(Priyanka Setia) who is also pregnant, takes charge of the threat. What follows is neither pleasant nor improbable.

Khauf is like an intricate jigsaw with missing pieces and pieces that don’t really fit in. This absence of symmetry and vindication gives the series a headstart as compared with more conventional fright flights. This is not the Delhi from Pink. It is much more dangerous for women where your spirit can be trammelled if you aren’t careful.

There is a cop, the mother of a missing boy, played by the ever-cogent Mishra (Gitanjali Kulakani) and her hostel warden friend Gracie Dung Dung(Shalini Vatsa). A strange bond of dereliction ties these two ruined single women together. An entire series can be comfortably made on this uncomfortable alliance.

And who exactly is that creepy Hakim (played with brilliant dread by Rajat Kapoor): is he an eerie healer or a student of Satan? Can the law get him? Kapoor’s role as the evil exorcist is defined by a huge ambiguity. Is this self-styled ghoul-buster even human?!

Khauf is the kind of unusual series where discomfort and obliqueness show the way out of the tunnel. There is a constant flow of messy subplots that do not add up. They are not meant to. Standing at the centre of the chaos is Madhu(played with habitual fidelity by Monika Panwar). Leaving her murky past behind in Gwalior, Madhu is in Delhi to make a new life for herself, provided death and man’s slaughter permit.

Panwar embraces all her characters’ trauma unconditionally. She wants her character to be as much at peace as we do. Everywhere Madhu is assailed by the stench of annihilation. The character is well played, and I don’t mean just the actress, but also destiny.

 Khauf is more a metaphor for violence against women than a horror show. In fact, by the end of the eighth episode, I was wondering why the ghoul was in the plot pool. This series would have benefited without the supernatural scare-giver. The humans provide enough scares.

Before I quit ruminating over the reams of soured dreams and subverted hostel life, there is one more performance I must single out. Rashmi Zurail Mann as the troubled speech-impaired Nikki, mirrors all the raging anxieties that make Khauf the best horror series since the devil got into our cinema.