The opening line from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina reads, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In Perfect Family, the Karkarias are also no different. Its members ache inside but always have a smile plastered on their face. Just another happy Indian family. Starring Manoj Pahwa, Seema Pahwa, Gulshan Devaiah, Girija Oak Godbole, and Neha Dhupia, the series, which has Pankaj Tripathi as one of the producers, is currently streaming on YouTube. It revolves around a Delhi Punjabi family who finds itself in a group therapy session after their youngest has to bear the brunt of their deep-seated issues.
The upkeep of mental health isn’t like putting an antiseptic on a bruise. Most of the time, one might ignore it like a razor nick, especially when one is in demanding professions like acting. “I realised the importance of mental health a bit too late,” confesses Manoj. “Infact, my wife (Seema Pahwa) and my kids go to therapy, but I am yet to. I come from a society where men are considered to be strong. They are the breadwinners, and women are the ones slogging in the kitchen, baking that bread. It was only after I joined theatre that I could unlearn these patriarchal notions,” he adds. “After working on this series I realised it is needed for me to go for therapy. Maybe, now I will.”
Pankaj understood the need to take care of his mental health two years ago, when he lost his father. “I didn’t feel like doing anything. I only felt gloomy all the time. I didn’t go for therapy, but I did practice self-awareness and sitting with my emotions,” says Pankaj. “I used to think I was an evolved man but after my father’s demise, I realised maybe I need to evolve more.”
If it was death that made Pankaj realise the importance of mental health, for Neha, it was birth. She found herself suffering from postpartum depression after giving birth to her first child in 2018. “I couldn’t understand what was happening,” she says. “I had this beautiful being in front of me, whom I love and adore, but I am also its food source. I wasn’t sleeping well. I couldn’t move much, and then having this baby who is so dependent on me, it got overwhelming at times.” Girija says she had her first tryst with a mental health issue pretty early. “I was 16 or 17, still in school, and I was getting symptoms that were similar to a panic attack. At that time, I thought I had a heart problem,” she says, with a laugh. “The words psychology and psychotherapy weren’t in common parlance. But when I went to my family doctor, they suggested that I should probably talk to someone. That was my first therapy session, and since then I have consulted mental health professionals whenever need be.”
In Perfect Family, the plot gets into motion after the youngest in the clan Daani (Hirvaa Trivedi), finds herself getting a panic attack in school because of the tumultuous environment at home. It often happens that parents having unresolved traumas sometimes unwillingly burden their children with their own emotional baggage. Manoj has a strong stance on this. “I believe there should be a legal authority that decides if a couple is fit to become parents,” he says. “Once two people get married, relatives start bugging them with, ‘When are you guys giving good news?’ It’s a serious decision. It’s about getting a life into this world, and people have made a mockery of it. Often, the couple might be having issues in their relationship and are still forced to have a child.”
“The child has become a remedy for a broken relationship,” adds Girija. “When you have the kid, parents want to give it everything they didn’t have, without even asking if the child even wants it or not. Parents also burden their children with their own expectations, thereby carrying the toxic patterns forward and not breaking them."
Manoj sums it up beautifully, “Parents should realise that they can’t decide their children’s life trajectory. They are like a trakash (quiver), which doesn’t know where the arrows fired from it will fall.”