Four short stories share one house on Ajeeb Daastaans, a 2021 Hindi-language anthology drama built entirely from relationships that are already close to breaking.
What is Ajeeb Daastaans about?
Rather than following one plot from start to finish, the film hands its runtime to four separate chapters, each with its own cast and setting. What links them is a single pressure point: an ordinary trigger, a small slight, a chance discovery, a rushed decision, lands on a bond that has been quietly straining for years, and the reaction is out of proportion to the cause because everything underneath it has been building for so long. The anthology format lets each segment breathe on its own terms before the film moves to the next, so tone and pace shift noticeably chapter to chapter even as the underlying question stays the same: what happens once a fractured relationship finally runs out of room to absorb any more.
About the cast
The four chapters are carried by a rotating ensemble rather than a single lead. Konkona Sen Sharma, Shefali Shah, Aditi Rao Hydari and Jaideep Ahlawat anchor separate segments, with Abhishek Banerjee, Nushrratt Bharuccha, Fatima Sana Shaikh and young Inayat Verma filling out the surrounding cast across the four stories. Because no actor carries the film end to end, each performer effectively gets a short film's worth of screen time to establish an entire arc.
Context & significance
The four segments were directed by Shashank Khaitan, Neeraj Ghaywan and Kayoze Irani, giving the anthology more than one directorial voice within the same two-hour runtime. That structure has become a familiar shape in Hindi-language cinema over the past decade, letting filmmakers work at short-story length on subjects that might feel thin stretched across a full feature, while still releasing the result as one unified title rather than four separate shorts.
Watching Ajeeb Daastaans on Ktime
Ajeeb Daastaans streams on K-Time with a free account login; the page itself is free to browse without signing in. K-Time's Farsi-first interface makes it easy for Persian-speaking viewers to search, queue and switch between anthology chapters like this one without losing their place.