UNDER S TATED MENACE

are hapless underdogs. And good will always find a way to outwit evil.

Sengupta and his co-writers (Varun Badola, Umesh Padalkar and Mohinder Pratap Singh) give a brief backgrounder, opening their story in Bengal's Sunderbans area, with a gruesome murder. The victim is a police officer. The suspects, it emerges, could be a couple of tribal girls and the local DSP Barun Ghosh (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) is soon on their trail.

Meanwhile, the girls are in Manali. They are professional dancers who have travelled all the way to Himachal Pradesh to perform at a wedding of the super-rich and powerful. The groom's Papaji (Harsh Chhaya) in a fit of drunken excitement shoots one of the girls. The body is disposed of by Papaji's foster son Rinku (Surya Sharma), also a local goon of sorts. Suddenly the other girl finds herself in peril. On the run from the murderous clan, the girl (Apeksha Porwal) is also being hunted by DSP Ghosh, who is adamant to take her back alive to Bengal, where the cop killing took place.

The screenplay sets up that premise crisply and early, leaving most of nine episodes to explore how the suspense pans out. Creator Sengupta and series director Ashish R. Shukla maintain an undercurrent sense of unease as the story builds up. The treatment works well, rendering an ominous appeal to the gorgeous Manali locales.

The series derives much of its intrigue from the contrast between Dibyendu Bhattacharya's DSP Barun Ghosh and Surya Sharma's Rinku. They define two faces of law and lawlessness, and also strike up very contrasting portraits of men whose lives are dictated by crime.