Raakh Season 1 Episode 3 Review: The Case Starts Bleeding Back

By Mira Vance · Editor & Lead Reviewer

Raakh Episode 3 turns evidence into pursuit, grief into denial, and Babu's Delhi detour into another ugly crime, as Jayprakash follows the blood trail with only forty-eight hours left.

The Arora Home Still Waits For Children Who Are Gone

Episode 3 opens with a memory that sounds tender until it starts hurting. A father keeps a sleepy child awake for a comet that appears once in seventy years. The child does not want talk of death or parents passing away first. Then the episode cuts back to the house where Ashok is sleeping in the children’s place and Mona tells him to get up because the children will need somewhere to sleep once they return.

That is the episode’s cruelest pressure point. Mona has seen enough to know what everyone is saying, but she is still moving through the morning as if school, radio, and routine can hold the world together. She goes back to school. A prayer is held for Suman and Sahil. Rashmi tries to speak to her. Mona answers grief with refusal. Suman is going to sing on the radio at 7:00 p.m., she says, and Rashmi should listen.

The moment is not played as madness for shock. Mona is refusing the only sentence she cannot survive. Raakh keeps the grief plain: a classroom, rain, a hymn, people who do not know what to say, and Mona holding onto a future the episode has already buried.

Baruah Turns The Car Into A Map Of Two Men

Dr. Baruah gives Jayprakash the confirmation the case needed and the burden it did not. The hunch was right. There were two people behind the murders, not one. Four sets of fingerprints were found in the stolen car, two belonging to people other than the children. One set is incomplete. The door handle was tampered with. The state of the car points to a struggle.

The murder weapon sharpens the trail. It is old, manufactured before independence, and marked with the name Shri Mohanlal Sodhi Chooranwala. That name becomes the strongest lead for the police, even as SP Hajra makes clear the investigation is running out of time. Jayprakash asks for faith. Hajra gives him forty-eight hours and not a minute more.

Later, Baruah’s work becomes even more useful. Fiber and blood samples show the children were in the rear seat and were attacked from the front. Blood on the umbrella belongs to the murderers. Sahil and Suman fought back hard enough to grievously injure the men who attacked them. For Jayprakash, that changes the shape of the search. He is no longer only looking for a stolen car and an old weapon. He is looking for wounded men who may have needed a hospital.

Chooranwala Leads JP To Ballu Sodhi

Jayprakash follows the Chooranwala lead to Chandni Chowk, near Parathewali Gali, while the press conference outside turns into another managed performance. Hajra tells reporters the children were kidnapped in a stolen green car, taken to the ridge area, and that two individuals are now being sought. Nisar wants more, but JP refuses to feed her a sensational tip. His joke about Jai and Veeru being spotted in Ramgarh is a quick escape from a reporter who knows exactly where to push.

Inside the old Chooranwala trail, the lead is messier than the name on the weapon. Mohanlal Sodhi is dead. His son Ballu is the living remnant: tied to old money, despised in the neighborhood, and remembered for harassing boys. One house and the shop have been sold. Ballu disappeared, but his name stays alive in other people’s disgust.

The case does not move through clean clues. It moves through gossip, shame, property, and old grudges. The weapon points to a family name. The family name points to a dead man. The dead man points to a son everyone wants to spit on. JP has a direction, but every direction in Raakh comes with rot around it.

Babu And Rajjo Bring Johnny’s Blood Into Delhi

Babu and Rajjo have fled to Delhi, but Johnny has not left Rajjo’s head. At a roadside meal, Babu tries to turn remorse into theatre. He apologizes for hitting Rajjo with a bottle. Rajjo is not angry about the bottle. He is haunted by the boy Babu killed, by the money they never got, and by the fact that survival has now become a struggle to sleep.

Babu’s confession sounds human for a moment. He says he lost his temper, that he had no father, that his mother burned to death in a kitchen, and that the burn erased the lines on his hand. Then he turns even that into performance, hitting himself until strangers intervene and Rajjo is forced into the role Babu wants from him: the forgiving friend.

Delhi becomes Babu’s next mask. Rajjo has a friend here, a singer at a five-star hotel. The hotel turns out not to be five-star, and Pyare Mohan’s stage is a harsher place than Rajjo expected. Rajjo is ashamed of what Pyare does for money. Babu sees usefulness. Pyare knows Ballu Sodhi Chooranwala, says Ballu harasses him, and says the man owns an old mansion. Babu hears only the part that sounds rich.

Nisar Finds A Lead While JP’s House Feels The Heat

Nisar’s thread keeps the press from being just background noise. Her editor chooses Sen’s red-scooter story, even though she argues that lead is a dead end because he only gave the children a lift to the Polo Club. She wants a shared byline for the photos and details she sourced. He wants a new angle. The case is now news, currency, and career pressure at once.

She gets her angle by working the edges of the police station. Mr. Singh will not talk officially, but he is tired, alone on the telephone, and buried under false sightings. People claim the children were seen on a train, at a fair, even fighting with two men in a car. Four calls are coming from the same number. When Nisar gently keeps him talking, one detail surfaces: someone named Chanda called from New Delhi station.

At home, Jayprakash is under a different kind of pressure. His aunt arrives from Indore with family warmth and fear in the same bag. His younger relative wants to study in Delhi; her mother refuses to send a child to what she calls a slaughter house. Even an army officer’s house could not protect children, she says. Then Ghanshyam arrives after taking food to the SP, and JP finally snaps. He tells his father not to come to the station and not to make him look foolish. In this episode, the case does not stay at work. It enters kitchens, marriages, studies, and the small humiliations of family status.

The Hospital Lead Arrives Before Ballu’s House Empties Out

The strongest break comes from the hospital. Dr. Sehgal remembers two wounded men arriving during a malaria rush from a nearby slum. Both had deep wounds. One was tall, the other about five and a half feet. One had an old burn scar on his hand and spoke in a strange accent. First they claimed a fight, then a car accident, but the wounds did not fit that story. They disappeared after X-rays and did not collect the reports.

Rathor had received the police call that night and failed to write a report, deciding it was not important. Jayprakash’s anger is earned because the delay may have cost them the men. Still, there is something usable: the names written down as Pyare Kumar and Mohan Kumar, and an address. JP orders a raid.

At the same time, Babu, Rajjo, and Pyare bring Ballu into the confrontation they think will pay. Pyare confronts him. Babu pretends to sell Pyare to him for one thousand rupees, then turns the humiliation into violence. Ballu answers with filth of his own, and the beating ends with Pyare told to get rope.

By the time JP reaches the address, it is empty. Another place has been cleaned of the men he needs. But the raid still matters. JP finds the Mohanlal Sodhi Chooranwala name there, linking the house to the weapon and proving the killers were close enough to the trail to leave heat behind. Babu, meanwhile, learns Ballu is not the rich prize he imagined. The episode ends with both sides almost touching and still missing.

Tiny details worth clocking

The comet memory is not just soft background. It puts parents, children, and death in the episode’s first breath, then lets Mona’s denial answer it.

The incomplete fingerprint matters because the episode later gives one suspect an old burn scar on his hand.

Babu’s apology is structured like a con. He offers pain, childhood damage, self-punishment, and loyalty, then uses Rajjo’s pity to reset control.

Nisar does not crack the case, but she finds the loose human system around it: tired policemen, gossip callers, missed reports, and information that leaks because everyone is exhausted.

Ghanshyam’s food errand shows love and damage at once. He is trying to help his son stay visible to power, but JP experiences it as humiliation.

Final verdict

Episode 3 is built on near misses. The police have the car, the weapon, the blood evidence, the hospital lead, and finally an address. None of it is fast enough. Every clue arrives with a delay, every delay gives Babu more room, and every room Babu enters becomes more dangerous.

The Arora family material keeps the investigation human. Mona’s school scene refuses spectacle; Mr. Arora’s brief bargain over a risky job suggests grief is already curdling into action, but the episode does not over-explain it.

The Babu-Rajjo-Pyare thread is uglier, louder, and sometimes abrasive, but it feeds the main case cleanly by the end. Raakh shows crime as a chain of weak men, missed duties, social contempt, and sudden violence, leaving Jayprakash close enough to feel the failure.

Rating: 8.3/10 - A tense, grimly connected episode that turns forensic detail into pursuit while keeping grief, family pressure, and criminal desperation in the same frame.

More episodes from Raakh — Crime, grief, and payback, episode by episode. Jump to any episode in the season:

Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.

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