If you have been on social media in the last few days, you surely would’ve come across reels or photos of Triptii Dimri channelising the ‘female rage’ in her latest turn as Jaya in Suresh Triveni’s Netflix film Maa Behen.
In an exclusive chat with The Telegraph Online, the film’s writer Pooja Tolani explains how she put that idea onto paper. She sounds slightly amused when she talks about the scene that has taken on a life of its own online.
For Tolani, it began much more quietly. “It never started off as a scene where I thought I was writing a big moment,” she said. “It came from the story.”
The Netflix film, set in the fictional town of Narazpur, follows Rekha (Madhuri Dixit) and her daughters Jaya (Triptii Dimri) and Sushma (Dharna Durga) as their lives spiral after a dead body turns up in their home. What begins as an accidental crisis steadily exposes buried tensions within the family: resentments, insecurities and years of emotional pressure that have never quite found expression.
Jaya’s breakdown arrives as part of that slow accumulation.
“I channelised my own rage,” Tolani said, but quickly moved the focus back to the character. “But I don’t think of it as me expressing something. Jaya is already in that place.”
She describes the character as someone under constant internal pressure. “In my head, Jaya is like a cauldron of boiling water with a lid on it,” she said. “It was only a matter of time before she lost it.”
That idea of inevitability is key to how the scene was written. The outburst is positioned as the point where everything the character has been holding in finally becomes uncontainable.
The scene has resonated widely with viewers, particularly in the way it captures a kind of emotional exhaustion that does not always find space in mainstream storytelling. But Tolani is careful not to frame it as an isolated “statement moment.”
“It came from sitting with the character and listening to what she is going through at that point in the story,” she said. “It wasn’t designed as a breakout scene.”
That approach also reflects how Maa Behen handles its tone overall. The film operates in the space between dark comedy and drama, where heightened emotions are treated as both serious within the moment and slightly absurd when viewed from outside it. Tolani says that duality was intentional.
“When you are inside a fight, it feels terrible,” she said. “But if you look at it later, or if you see someone else going through it, it can feel funny.”
That tension is what gives the film its rhythm. The characters do not behave for effect. They behave as people under pressure, and the humour emerges from how that pressure looks once it spills over.
Tolani acknowledges that writing in this register carries risk. The line between dark and comedy is thin, especially in a story where characters often speak and react in amplified emotional states.
“I know most of these characters,” she said. “I know people who talk like this. I’ve seen them. I’ve heard them.”
Even the more intense exchanges in the film, she argues, are rooted in observation rather than invention. “When you are writing, you are not creating behaviour from nothing,” she said. “You are putting together things you have already seen in the world.”
She acknowledges that audiences are reading into it in ways that go beyond plot mechanics. “Maybe people are recognising something of their own experience in it,” she said. “That feeling of holding things in for too long and then something just gives way.”
“For me, the film is mainly about these three women and how they have lived their lives,” she adds. “But they are all carrying insecurities and unresolved issues. That comes from their circumstances.”
The film also deliberately uses everyday names — Rekha, Jaya, Sushma, Hema — something Tolani says was intended to reinforce ordinariness rather than symbolism.
“These are everyday women,” she said. “They are not extraordinary in a cinematic sense. They are ordinary women placed in unusual situations.”
Tolani, who grew up in Kolkata, is also dismissive of ongoing industry debates that pit “south Bombay stories” against small-town narratives, arguing that the issue is not geography but execution.
“It’s not about location,” she said. “It’s about whether the world you are creating feels real.”
A film can fail in an elite urban setting if it is poorly observed, she added, just as a fictional small town can feel authentic if the emotional texture is precise.
“If your emotion hits home, it works,” she said.