Mumbai: Bhuvan Arora’s character in the Amazon web series Dupahiya, Amavas, is a study in contradiction. He’s a motorcycle-riding kleptomaniac who drinks, smokes and doesn’t seem particularly bothered by what anybody thinks of him. But in front of Shivani Raghuvanshi’s Roshni, the woman he loves, the tough guy is nowhere to be seen.
For two seasons, Amavas has been at Roshni’s beck and call. He repairs her motorcycle, helps her prepare for her SSC examination and even tries to get her a leaked question paper, despite knowing that she doesn’t return his feelings.
Dupahiya, now in its second season on Prime Video, is set in the fictional Bihar village of Dhadakpur. While the first season revolved around a stolen motorcycle, the second follows a mobile-tower dispute and an examination paper leak. Amid the village’s many problems, Amavas’s relationship with Roshni remains one of the show’s quieter storylines.
Arora knows Amavas is making a fool of himself.
“What kind of a fool is he? He keeps doing these things for a woman who never reciprocates,” the actor told ThePrint.
But he also understands why Amavas cannot simply walk away. Arora recalled a conversation with his nephew, who has a habit of putting his finger in his mouth. When Arora told him it was a bad habit, the child agreed. He knew he shouldn’t do it, but how was he supposed to convince his brain to stop?
A lovable loser
For Arora, Amavas is much the same.
“He knows this is a toxic woman, but he cannot help himself. He is madly in love,” he said.
When director Sonam Nair first met Arora, she offered him a choice between two characters—Bhugol, Roshni’s excitable younger brother, and Amavas.
“I had been doing a lot of buffoonery on screen,” Arora said. He chose Amavas because he found the character more interesting.
Nair wanted a “lovable loser”, a man who looked raw, rugged and mature but was completely helpless when it came to the woman he loved.
“The hard part was to make Amavas look raw and macho. I think I am a softie myself, so the love part came easy,” he said.
Arora is considerably more talkative than Amavas. He enjoys comedy and improvisation, and likes to believe he has a natural flair for making people laugh. Or perhaps, he said, people have simply been deceiving him about his sense of humour for years.
His breakthrough role as Firoz, Shahid Kapoor’s friend and partner in counterfeiting in Farzi (2023), gave him plenty of room to improvise. Amavas was another matter.
In his scenes with Sparsh Shrivastava, who plays Bhugol, Arora would often think of something to say back to him. But Amavas wasn’t the sort to come up with a witty reply.
“There were so many times I wanted to say so many things on set. But you can’t go out of character. I can’t let Bhuvan’s emotions overshadow Amavas’s.”
The writing helped too. Arora said Avinash Dwivedi and Chirag Garg had written the characters and their relationships so well that he didn’t feel much need to improvise. He estimates that he added only four lines in the first season.
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Biker from Lajpat Nagar
The Delhi-born Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) graduate spent nearly a decade playing smaller roles before Farzi made him widely recognisable. He has since appeared in Chandu Champion (2024), the Tamil film Amaran (2024) and Dupahiya.
Arora even changed how Amavas breathed. With Bhugol and the other villagers, he breathed from his belly, relaxed and authoritative. With Roshni, it was different.
“With Roshni, you breathe in a way that you succumb,” he explained.
In his head, the brief was, “poori duniya ek taraf aur Roshni ek taraf“. The whole world on one side, Roshni on the other.
To get that nervousness right, Arora thought back to his own experiences of young love.
“When my hand brushes against Roshni’s hand, it’s still that feeling I felt the first time I hugged a girl. I remember it stayed for days,” he said.
The bike riding didn’t need as much work. Arora grew up in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar and has been riding motorcycles since before he was legally old enough to have a licence. He is quick to clarify that he isn’t proud of that now. Since then, he has ridden through Leh-Ladakh, Thailand and Europe. Bhutan is next on his list.
Getting the Bihari accent right was harder. Arora spent a lot of time rehearsing with a diction coach in his vanity van before shoots. His mother-in-law, who is originally from Bihar, helped too. He also uses music to familiarise himself with unfamiliar languages. For Amaran, for instance, he listened to Tamil songs to pick up the pronunciation.
The second season’s SSC paper-leak storyline has arrived amid a national debate over competitive examinations and allegations of cheating. But the timing, Arora said, was a coincidence. They had shot the season last year.
He joked that perhaps it was divine providence, and more people would discover Dupahiya because of it.
By the end of the season, there is a change in Amavas’s love life too. He finally asks Roshni to marry him. She says she cannot see him as a husband. Arora believes that gives Amavas the closure he needs to move on.
He agrees to an arranged marriage with Jugnu, although viewers never get to see her face.
That was deliberate, Arora said.
“If you give her a face, then you obviously put in a constant comparison between Roshni and Jugnu.”
Arora hopes Dupahiya gets a third season. He thinks the writers are already considering where to take the story from here. But whether that includes finally showing viewers Jugnu’s face is something he doesn’t know yet.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)