Radha and her brother Birju Kaul are amongst the oldest of about five surviving siblings in a Rajasthani village. Two younger brothers (Sanjay and Amit) could be mentioned, but may not appear as often, so is a little sister named Saraswati.
The late Dilip has a thuggish twin sister named Deva and four younger brothers; the also late parental abuse victim Ramu, the nuanced ex-conman Tulsi, the relatively better adjusted accountant Shamu and the foul killer cop Sukreta. To be fair, they’re pretty screwed up to various degrees mostly due to their also screwed up mother Jamun, herself the story’s equivalent of present day Georgia’s George the Wicked. It doesn’t help that her moneylender husband Raaj is one of her many chew toys before he died.
Deva Bhadoria is Radha’s old rival from school, who has undiagnosed narcissistic tendencies as well as having a bit of a mean ego. Thankfully, said ego is mostly related to how bad her home environment was, thus she decides to do a slow but worthy heel face turn near the end of the story.
Ramu was a big time shut in, and in his mother’s eyes, her favourite experiment ever (in a sarcastic way). The good thing is that, even though he was partly deaf on both ears and also being really unattractive looking in her eyes, he did try to survive, but couldn’t get out of his mum’s house almost every day of his life. It’s pretty sad that much of what he did was to flee and chitter like crazy almost every time his really awful mum saw him, and finally had him dragged out for a year on the latter’s porch anyway, which is made even sadder when she offed him once and for all by slicing off his whole body with a chainsaw.
Tulsi hasn’t always been poor but clearly does suffer from not being raised by someone resembling a good enough mother for the rest of his life, hence him being a seedy, hotheaded dude trying to curb both his thuggishness and fellow bad behaviours. He does have a good point and with significant long term help from most of his brothers (and a good enough community service that neither the corrupt Rajasthani forces nor even Victorian era Brits would have adopted) is a well intentioned criminal turned into a member of what society was intended to be known for, instead of really being corrupted from the start, even after being punched so badly by Sukreta that he didn’t want to be in a punitive prison forever.
Shamu is a mopey, if decently adjusted, office worker and commuter who doesn’t like eating dogs, partly because they’re mistreated badly by bad people and partly because certain Indians view them as food.
Sukreta seems to be the only one who behaves almost exactly like his mother, but it’s mostly due to how his otherwise quite good enough uncle and aunt have coddled him ridiculously to smithereens. He is himself the ‘colourless minded person’ of the story, due to him getting away with anything at all, thus he’s also depicted as something of a dog eater like his mother and a part of the insanely corrupt police system which rules Radha’s old village with revealingly indicative impunity.
Raaj was the father of six children, including Sukreta himself. He was the story’s supposedly main big bad moneylender until Jamun reveals herself to the audience by killing and eating the family’s very own pet dog. From then on, his home situation got so bad that it resulted in him being offed into the land of death by Jamun herself, with Sukreta becoming a hyper violent cop as a questionable (yet brutally accurate) trigger to end her monstrous reign, which is a sign of how screwed up the family surely is after all.
Anand was Radha’s dead first husband with undiagnosed PTSD. He had two surviving sisters and two overbearing parents. After groping her boobs, much to the dismay of his few long term ex friends, he totally went mad in the forest for a month and offed himself to death with a gun of his own; a scenario so unsubtly bad and terrifying in itself that it deserves something like a Razzie trophy.
Champa and Rupa Jadeja were his much nicer sisters, since being saner Betas than their dysfunctional Alpha leader in a corrupt school may do a lot to them in a positive light for the rest of their lives.
Shashi Zinta was Radha’s other acquaintance; he’s got a sane mind, even though he happened to have a physically visibly familiar disability caused by heavy gangrene infections, which affected both of his arms rather badly. Sadly, he and his mum would die in Vinod’s hands.
Meena is Shashi’s surviving younger sister, who’d become a well intentioned young lady thief in a misogynistic mob of dacoits, after seeing her mother having the latter’s own life destroyed by Vinod. Fortunately, she is one of only a few would have been women prisoners who reformed well, slowly but surely due to her fairly redeeming love with a moderately mentally unstable prison warden who just wants to get out if at all. She’s also a relatively luckier exception than a majority of her bad friends due to her cautious and pragmatic nature.
Meera is Shashi’s late Mother, who also had no full arms due to a series of egregious motor related crashes that rendered her unable to carry anything again. She also suffered from certain cancerous tumours, due to the various pollution factors plaguing certain parts of North Central India.
Vinod was the husband of Meera. He was a creepy and nightmarishly absurd dude whose fixations are mostly about the dollars, as he was himself the only child and son of a forced marital conception between a wealthy British woman and an unlucky local man.
