My new favorite TV show: Hindi Vampire Soap Opera

Here in Varanasi I'm staying with a nice host family that spends their evenings watching Hindi "serials" (soap operas that air during primetime). I used to be unable to stand these TV shows. That is, until I saw Pyaar Kii Ye Ek Kahaani (This One Love Story).

Basically it's a vampire soap opera. Here's the back story, as told to me by my host sister Pooja (she had to get me up to speed, naturally): in the 1800's Siddharth, Abhay, and Maithili were all regular people living regular people lives. One day Siddharth and Abhay, who are brothers, get turned into vampires and Maithili gets killed (how did this happen? I don't know. Pooja left these details out). Siddharth's and Abhay's transformations give them the ability to live forever without aging as long as they don't touch silver, in which case they get seriously injured or die (I guess their equivalent of Superman's Kryptonite?).

Fast forward to present-day. Siddharth is the "bad" vampire and Abhay is the "good" vampire. Both Siddharth and Abhay are in love with a college human named Piya, who looks identical to Maithili and is supposedly Maithili's reincarnation. Abhay is dating Piya while Siddharth is a player who seduces women in order to kill them and drink their blood. Siddharth's targets are usually girls he thinks are easy--"T" (that's her nickname, I don't know her real name) dresses like a slut (by Indian standards) so he goes for her. And he was right in thinking she's super easy; she really does act like a slut on their date, practically throwing herself all over him. But Abhay comes to the rescue, which leads to an epic battle of facial expressions (see below). Meanwhile, Piya's best friend Panchi (who is also Piya's half-sister, but Panchi doesn't know that) is in love with Siddharth. When Panchi finds out Siddharth went on a date with T, she is super jealous. But Siddharth understands that it will be even easier to steal Panchi's blood, so he dumps T and tells Panchi that he loves her. Abhay warns Piya to keep Panchi away from Siddharth but doesn't say why (Piya doesn't know they are brothers or that Siddharth is a vampire; it is unclear to me if she is aware that Abhay is a vampire). Piya responds that if Siddharth makes her friend happy, then she doesn't want to interfere, and she gets pissed at Abhay. Another layer to the story is that Siddharth and Abhay's father is the caretaker of some all-powerful vampire ring, and of course the evil Siddharth wants to steal the ring from his father to acquire the superpowers. I have surmised from the license plates (everyone is rich and has a car) that this show takes place in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, probably in the capital city of Dehradun. This provides for lots of creepy hill forest scenes.

There is also a slew of other characters who have complicated back stories with each other (for example, there's some story about another girl who is pregnant but unmarried and her friend Misha, who is also Panchi's sister, pretends to be pregnant to protect her somehow, and then Misha's father finds out that she's "pregnant" without knowing it's a lie. another example: Panchi and Misha's father is also Piya's father, but the father is completely unaware that Piya is his daughter. And these just two of many, many stories). You can read the insanely long and complex paragraph here in Wikipedia describing everything that has been going on in the series (yes even more insanely long and complex than what I've just written, and no I didn't read the article).

...and I love every second of this show. Why?

1. The language. The Hindi isn't spoken nearly as quickly as in other serials so I'm actually able to pick up most of what is going on. And the vampires speak unusually large amounts of English for a Hindi serial, and their English is excellent (who knew vampires were multilingual?).

2. The fight scenes. They involve absolutely zero fighting but employ the classic Hindi serial technique of rapidly spinning the camera around the characters to the point of making the viewer dizzy and repeatedly zooming in on the same unmoving, unnaturally overexpressive faces (the expression during fight scenes: I am really, really, really mad and am going to kick your ass like no other ass has been kicked before) (but the ass-kicking never actually happens, you only see the threatening faces). One fight scene was put to an end when Siddharth and Abhay's father rushed to intervene and out-facially-expressed both of them into submission.

The teeth-baring (and associated hissing sounds) indicate that they are angry. The background is blurry because the camera is spinning around them at a very quick pace.

The father out-stares his sons, thereby putting an end to the fight.

3. Siddharth's art of seduction. He is super smooth and not at all creepy. ...that was a lie.

Siddharth seduces T by telling her she smells tasty. He even calls her "Tasty T" several times.

4. The aforementioned creepy hill forest scenes. Always at night and with lots of mist. Siddharth's favorite place to take girls on dates. Of course these girls find the forest romantic, despite the darkness, mist, middle-of-nowhereness, and scary music, and can't wait to jump into bed (er, under a tree?) with Siddharth. Also where fights take place. See all of the above pictures.

5. Vampire smell detection. Vampires use their sense of smell to detect the location of other vampires, even miles away. This involves several characters exaggeratedly sniffing for extended periods of time. These actors really know how to take a good, long whiff!

6. T's response to Siddharth dumping her. "How GAY are you?!" (said in English)

7. The intellectual challenge. There are so many characters with so many intertwining stories I could never possibly dream of understanding or following it all, especially starting in the middle of the series.

8. The ginormous amounts of drama. Did I mention the battles of the facial expressions?! The constant camera-spinning and face-zooming are not limited to the fight scenes, but happen every time something dramatic happens. Which is quite often.

9. The lack of logic. Nothing on the show ever makes any sense.

10. The frequency of new episodes. In America, our TV series give us a new episode once a week. That means we have to wait one entire week to find out what happens next, and god knows how agonizingly painful that can be! Not in India, folks. Here we only have to wait 23.5 hours, because there is a new episode every single day! (Except Sunday. After Saturday night's episode you have to wait 47.5 hours, and man will that be difficult for me!)

Ok so I guess several of these reasons are really the same reason: this show is HILARIOUS. Seriously it's like nonstop laughter for 30 minutes (ok, fine, there are stops for commercials) (actually, many of those commercials are also laughter-inducing). I can't wait to spend more quality time with my host family following the lives of these vampires and their human love interests.

In other news, I'm awake now because a gecko woke me up by landing on my face while I was sleeping. Yes, a gecko actually fell from the ceiling and landed on my nose, with one leg in my right nostril, another leg on my left eye, and the tail crossing my lips and curling around my chin. I had no idea what to do (screaming may have resulted in the gecko falling into my mouth so I stayed quiet) and just lied on the bed with my face paralyzed for about a minute before the gecko decided to move off my face and back toward the wall. The longest 60 seconds of my life, man. I didn't even know it was possible for geckos to lose their grip and fall (India is full of surprises, I suppose). And now I'm too scared to fall back asleep, so I decided to kill a few hours writing this blog post.