4 min readMar 20, 2026 04:32 PM IST Chiraiya review: To make a series on marital rape, a subject so thorny that decades of activism have gone nowhere in the courts — what happens between married couples in their bedrooms stays there — is brave in and of itself. And the first three episodes of the six-part Chiraiya, a show revolving around a traditional Lucknow family forced to deal with uncomfortable truths, is truly effective in showing us just how hard it is for regular folks to accept that ‘something like this’ can exist amongst us all. Kamlesh (Divya Dutta), married to what appears to be the nicest guy in the universe (Faisal Rashid), has consoled herself for not ‘being able’ to produce a son (she has a daughter) that she has lavished all her maternal care on Arun, her very pleased-by-himself ‘devar’ (brother-in-law). Her poetry-writing father-in-law (Sanjay Mishra) also appears, at first glance, a paternal figure who keeps his flock together amiably, without asserting his heavy-handed ‘sasur’ self, but only up to a point. …