When you think of great Indian love stories, chances are you envision grand gestures, colourful dance numbers and sudden tragedies (bonus points if Shah Rukh Khan dies for a beloved). But in real life, it’s pretty unlikely that an admirer will need to go to such lengths to win our hearts, or experience such earth-shattering horrors to break them.
Romance rarely pans out the way TV portrays it. Most of us don’t experience Bollywood’s famed grand gestures, or Disney’s cookie-cutter happy ending. Instead, we find love in moments, in the spaces between words, in glances shared and left unspoken. And it’s this quieter, more delicate (but still life-altering) version of love that Four Years Later seeks to shine a light upon.
Sridevi (Shahana Goswami) and Yash (Akshay Ajit Singh) walk through the streets of Jaipur on their first date. Credit: SBS / Megha Chhattani
The new SBS Original romantic drama series explores the most intimate and vulnerable moments between vivacious Sridevi (Shahana Goswami) and introvert Yash (Akshay Ajit Singh), a newly married couple excited to begin a life together in Jaipur, India only to suddenly find themselves forced to live apart for four years. Yash is accepted into a medical traineeship in Australia that he can’t refuse, and due to forces out of the couple’s control, they must part ways and still somehow find their way back to one another.
Told through dual perspectives, while flitting across time and space and between Sydney and Jaipur, the series explores how distance can transform a relationship and sometimes leave it unrecognisable. Is simply loving someone enough for a relationship to survive? For Yash and Sridevi, who are complete opposites, this is a battle they must struggle with every day.
“I liked the fact that it was nothing very dramatic, yet so pertinent and so deep,” Shahana Goswami says of Four Years Later’s script.
“Modern-day romances and the difficulties of it are really about small hits and misses that happen.
“They're not about grand mistakes and purposefully hurting each other. These are really about distance, conflicting ambitions, circumstances, not knowing yourself entirely, insecurities. They're much more subtle, nuanced things. And I felt like this show really brought that out in the writing, in the scenes, in the build up.”
Shahana Goswami as Sridevi and Akshay Ajit Singh as Yash in Four Years Later. Credit: SBS
Four Years Later is less interested in the life-altering events that happen to its romantic leads, but in the moments after them, in the vulnerability they bring out, and the tough decisions that must be made because of them. Yash and Sridevi’s long distance relationship is inspired by the real-life experiences of the show’s creator Mithila Gupta, who met her now-husband during the COVID lockdown and had to date long distance as a result. Yash’s experience in Australia — complete with racist encounters, hostility from locals and an increasing sense of isolation — were also inspired by her parents’ struggles in migrating to a new land.
The plotline hit home for Ashkay Ajit Singh, who was once in the same space as Yash when his work moved him from Delhi to Mumbai.
“The desire and the want to be close to someone, and not being able to, and wishing with every bone in your body, with every fibre of your being, just to have that power to teleport and go and, you know, hug and be held, but not having that — that was real in my case,” he says.
Akshay Ajit Singh says he can relate to the challenges his character Yash faced in moving to a new land. Credit: SBS
The vulnerability Yash grapples with on screen was also confronting for Singh, who realised these emotions were ones he too was guilty of boxing up and compartmentalising.
“[Yash] had a lot of vulnerability that he had to show on screen,” he says.
“Growing up, I was taught vulnerability is weakness. It was really hard for me to open up, to be vulnerable in moments of emotions and intimacy. The scenes that we were shooting were really coming from a very honest place.
“Some of the scenes that were written were so poignant and real. There are scenes where no word was spoken, yet the way it was written was so beautiful that you could feel the emotions in a thousand different ways.”
In fact, quite a few scenes in Four Years Later can be interpreted differently based on your own perspective because of its recurring theme of duality: India can be seen as both loving and suffocating, Australia as freeing and isolating, love being healing and hurtful, and migrant experiences as exciting and painful.
Shahana Goswami as Sridevi in 'Four Years Later'.
“The point is to be able to see this duality not as opposite and separate, but part of one another, and learn to balance and appreciate both sides,” Goswami muses. “I think that that's essentially part of what all of us struggle with and experience in life as well.”
For a story that is so granular and intimate, Four Years Later is remarkably universal.
“We're all connected. We're all experiencing similar things. We all kind of intersect and interject each other's lives in that kind of way,” Goswami says.
Migrants make up more than 30 per cent of Australia’s population, so Sridevi and Yash’s longing, homesickness, and deep love for their culture and families will be a familiar story to many underrepresented Aussies.
“The fact that a show in Australia for Australian television is showcasing two Indians speaking in an Indian English accent in the lead, I thought that was amazing, because that's something I have never seen anywhere in the world,” Goswami says.
All 8 episodes of Four Years Later are streaming now at SBS On Demand.
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Four Years Later
series • drama • Hindi
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series • drama • Hindi
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