Why Raakh is one of the most emotionally cathartic Indian shows in recent years

Raakh revisits the 1978 Ranga-Billa case not as a crime thriller, but as a deeply human story of grief, loss and the lives left behind. It's an emotionally stirring watch that stays with you long after it ends.

In Short

• The series follows parents, investigators and a journalist through layered grief
• Supporting characters are given space, making their pain feel immediate and lived
• Babu and Rajjo are examined through childhood, loyalty, violence and complicity

Nearly fifty years later, the ashes still burn. The 1978 Ranga-Billa case – the unspeakable abduction, torture, and murder of the two innocent Chopra siblings in the heart of Delhi – has returned not as distant history, but as a living wound in Prosit Roy’s Raakh. If you are still contemplating watching it, let me ensure this is no mere crime-thriller. Watching the eight-episode show feels like peeling back layers, one by one. It gently but relentlessly asks you to sit with the grief, the horror, the lives that could have been, and the small traces of humanity that somehow survive even in the darkest moments.

Watching it feels nothing like entertainment but like a painful, necessary reckoning – one that leaves you cathartically drained, disturbed and strangely more awake.

Roy and his team refuse the clinical detachment so common in the crime-thriller genre. Instead, they hand us multiple windows into the same tragedy, inviting us to inhabit the pain from every angle.

We sit with Mona Arora (Sonali Bendre), the mother whose grief is a silent, suffocating ocean of denial and rage. Her performance is devastating in its restraint – every unspoken word, every hollow stare carries the weight of a future stolen, of innocence murdered.

Opposite her, Lt. Col. Ashok Arora (Aamir Bashir) channels his anguish into a different kind of fury: the military man who could guard borders but could not protect his own children in the capital. Their individual journeys through loss feel deeply personal, yet universally resonant. You don’t just watch parents break; you feel the fracture in your own chest.

The procedural spine is carried by Sub-Inspector Jayprakash Jatav (Ali Fazal, in what feels like career-defining work), but his story is equally human.

His personal battles give the story its emotional weight. His strained relationship with his father (Rakesh Bedi), a former sub-inspector who comes from a very different time, beautifully captures the gap between two generations. While his father believes things were simpler, JP is constantly up against a system that looks away and the harsh realities of caste. These moments make the investigation feel deeply personal. Fazal's performance is all restraint, with so much conveyed through his body language alone. You can feel the exhaustion of a man chasing a monster who always seems one step ahead.

Meanwhile, the supporting cast doesn't just exist to move the plot along. Anshul Chauhan's journey as the journalist Nisar Rizvi, along with the stories of other characters, adds even more heart to the series. Every character gets a chance to be vulnerable, to hurt, and to feel real, making the world of the show all the more lived-in.

(Spoiler alert: The following section discusses key narrative choices and character arcs from Raakh.)

What truly stays with you in Raakh is the way it treats the siblings Suman and Sahil Arora (Divya Sharma and Vivaan Sharma).

So often in crime thrillers, victims become little more than names in a police file or faces in a photograph. But not here. The series takes its time to show who they were before tragedy struck. We see their dreams, the innocence they shared as siblings, their little moments of joy, and a future that was only just beginning to unfold.

That is what makes their loss so heartbreaking.

They are not remembered for the way they died, but for the lives they never got the chance to live. Divya Sharma, despite her brief screen time, leaves behind an ache that you carry for days.

If you still somehow aren't convinced to invest in the darkly unsettling show. You will be now. Prosit Roy presents the perpetrators – Babu (Akash Makhija) and Rajjo (Ramandeep Yadav) – who defy the cartoonish villain template.

The maker also takes his time to understand the minds of Babu and Rajjo. We get glimpses of Babu's troubled childhood, his fractured mind, and his deeply unhealthy relationship with Rajjo. Their bond is unsettling – part brotherhood, part control – where one leads and the other follows, even when it means crossing every line.

The series never asks you to feel sorry for them. It simply helps you understand how such darkness takes shape, which is perhaps even more disturbing. Their direct stares into the camera are chilling, making your skin crawl. Rajjo, too, feels like a tragic mix of someone shaped by Babu's influence and someone who knowingly chooses to become part of the horror. The deeper the series goes into their world, the more unsettling it becomes, reminding you that the scariest monsters are often painfully human.

This is the antithesis of the standard crime thriller formula. No tidy sequence of crime, investigation, confession, and closure. Raakh lingers in the mess, the psychology, and the irreversible damage.

With Raakh, director Prosit Roy earns a place alongside shows like Delhi Crime, Paatal Lok, Kohrra, Black Warrant and Criminal Justice – the rare Indian crime dramas that understand solving a case is only half the story.

The real impact lies in what they leave behind: grief that lingers, uncomfortable questions, and a deeper understanding of human frailty. They don't simply shatter you with tragedy; they reconstruct you with empathy.

(Major spoiler alert: The next section discusses the ending of Raakh in detail.)

The true emotional release or perhaps the deepest wound arrives in the finale. After justice, of a sort, is served, Roy offers haunting imagery of alternate realities: What if the siblings hadn’t taken that lift? What if they had run laughing through the rain to the radio station? What if the killers had taken another route, or found a shred of humanity? We see the lives they could have led – Suman singing, family moments of pride and normalcy.

It is beautiful, devastating, and profoundly cathartic. You sit staring at the screen, drenched in regret for lives unlived, feeling as if you, too, bear some responsibility for vigilance in a world that looks away. As Anshul’s Nisar echoes: "Uss shaam, un 15 minuteon mein hum kahan the? Hum kya kar rahe the... jab Dilli hamesha ke liye badal rahi thi? (In those 15 minutes, that evening, where were we... and what were we doing, as Delhi changed forever?"

Raakh does not offer easy comfort or triumphant resolution. Its catharsis comes from forcing us to feel everything – the parents’ unending void, the investigator’s futile rage, the victims’ stolen futures, and our own complicity in forgetting. It lingers like smoke in the lungs. It haunts because it humanises the unimaginable. And in that haunting, we find an odd, painful purification.

- Ends