Welcome to the world of DI Rachita Ray (Parminder Nagra), ITV’s newest cop. We meet her in the local shop choosing what to have for her tea – until a mentally disturbed man with a knife runs past and out into the square. As she runs to catch up with him, while calling in the armed response unit, he stabs a police officer. She manages to talk him into giving up the weapon without further loss of life and, as a reward, is promoted to the role of detective inspector of the homicide division. Life would be sweet for the ambitious DI if it hadn’t, over the preceding 10 minutes, shown how laced with racism it is for a person of colour at every turn.
Sometimes, they are moments of othering – the customer in the shop who assumes she is an assistant not a customer, for example – that disrupt what should be the easy flow of daily life. Sometimes, they are even larger, such as the fact that she has been overlooked for promotion until her public heroic act brings her inescapably to the attention of the top brass, and that even the promotion when it does come is tainted by apparent tokenism. “Where are you from?” her unofficial interviewer asks her after the bravery award ceremony. “Leicester,” she replies. “What’s your heritage?” he inevitably responds. Punjab on her mother’s side and Bengal on her father’s. “I think,” adds Ray. “You’re exactly what we need right now,” he says, pleased to have found the right tick for the right box.
