CAST: Supriya Pathak, Manoj Pawah, Chakori Dwivedi, Poojan Chhabra

DIRECTION: Aakansha Dua

Close to her retirement, a schoolteacher has to deal with the apprehension of moving out of the quarters that have been her home for decades and start building a house of her own. The dream house loses some of its charm when constricted as it is by expediencies like budgets and permits; they have to deal with the realities of the process of building it.

All of this does not prevent Sarala Joshi (Supriya Pathak) and her family from striving toward their dreams in Posham Pa Pictures’ Home Shanti.

The Joshis live in Dehradun, with their own idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. Umesh Joshi (Manoj Pahwa), a poet, is good-natured and loved by everyone but completely untrustworthy for any pragmatic purposes. His wife, Sarala who burdened with financial and familial pressures is resolved to have her own way with the house she’s building.

She is the archetypal middle-class woman for whom, owning her own house is the supreme dream, and she literally spends hours overseeing every brick that goes into its making.

 Their children, Jigyasa and Naman, are regular teenagers: Jigyasa (Chakori Dwivedi), the class geek, trying make-up techniques to impress her date; Naman (Poojan Chhabra), a Tiger Shroff fan who wants nothing more than his own private gym to impress chicks.

Each episode explores a new challenge the family faces while building the house: the demands of the priest for the Bhoomi Poojan, the architectural plans that just don’t have space for all the needs of each member wants, official government permits, distrustful contractors, and the nameplate for the home.

They also struggle with their own anxieties and uncertainties: Umesh learns to share his precious poems on stage, Naman becomes more compassionate towards his sister, Sarala relearns to be naïve and yet not give up on her ethics.

The story is something you’ve seen before, and the dialogues are insipid and without spice. The fictional characters, especially Umesh and Sarala, move you, but that is more to do with the acting skills of Pahwa and Pathak, who are exceptional.

The conflicts the characters face are extremely relevant, whether it is Naman eating chicken potstickers on the day of the puja, or Umesh forgetting the password to his safe or the interfering mother in law or Sarala struggling to accept her evolution from a school vice principal to a retired person.