A snake in the grass. Now there’s a metaphor.
Everyone tries to calm down a breathless Madeline at the open of this episode, but they all appear to be missing the fact that she’s having a whale of a time. After all, they are traipsing through the ruins of an erotic temple: a monument erected to celebrate sensuality and sexual invention, now abandoned as the men who built it have wandered off somewhere else more interesting.
That might be another metaphor that Madeline herself is missing. The guide tells newcomer Farquar that the more important erotic carvings are around the back. ‘Aren’t they always,’ he responds, as if he’s spent most of his formative years in Soho bookshops in the fifties.
The Dalals have dinner, and Sita is the guest of honour, while Sunni is bridling with pleasant anger. ‘Look at you, so pink and fat,’ she spits at her brother in a textbook example of passive aggression. ‘Maybe one day you will be viceroy.’
The conversation soon descends into an Indian version of ‘what have the Romans ever done for us’. Sooni’s father can’t keep a lid on his irritation: ‘The British gave you an education to sit here scorning your own father,’ Sooni doesn’t argue. Not with that point, anyway.
The elder Dalals get a lovely scene to themselves later on, where we get to see them being husband and wife, rather than harried, proud parents. ‘I won’t to tell Aafrin to run,’ Bapi remarks, indicating that he’s the most progressive traditionalist in a thirty mile radius, ‘whenever the world tells him to stop.’ He might be telling his son to run even faster, if he could see how curious Alice attempts to catch Aafrin’s eye and heart: ‘I tried being unhappy. Other people seem to manage, don’t they?’
Dougie is an interesting character. On the outside, he looks like the retro hipster that sold you an artisan coffee last week: tall, skinny, no dairy. That’s the coffee, by the way, not Dougie, but now you mention it. As the ‘uncle’ of the local orphanage, and saddled with yearning looks at the beautiful and intelligent Leena, he clearly fancies himself as a bit of a Heathcliff. But he flinches away from his wife, Sarah, who despite her complex faults, is making an effort to connect. But Dougie would much rather disprove the old ‘no man is an island’ theory.
This episode is full of the sort of revelations that are normally held back to the season finale (so yes, you win your bet: Ralph is Adam’s father), meaning that it’ll be interesting to see where things go in the remaining episodes (or indeed in the second season). But now, everyone is being dragged into everyone else’s conspiracies.
Ralph is spinning more plates than an entertainer at one of Cynthia Coffin’s tea parties, and it’s increasingly difficult to keep track of what he knows: the camera angle carefully hides his expression from us whenever he walks into a room where his sister is being doe eyed and breathless with Aafrin. He’s not so subtle with Captain Farquar later, though and moves quickly to support his sister by introducing Farquar to both gravity and a staircase.
Aafrin, used to taking notes from Ralph, will well understand the implications.
Aired at 9pm on Sunday 22 March 2015 on Channel 4.
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