Could your marriage survive if you were apart for four years?

Mithila Gupta, creator, co-writer and executive producer of new SBS TV drama series Four Years Later, is a relatively rare force in TV production. “My parents have always taught me to use what the world might see as a weakness as your strength,” she says. “Being a woman, but also a person of colour, has often been a challenge in this industry. A challenge to earn a position of power, to prove that I can do it and to get that voice out there.”

In Four Years Later, Gupta, who was born in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan in India, and migrated to Australia aged four, is giving voice to contemporary Indian culture here and in India via a story of love, immigration and self-discovery.

Filmed in Jaipur, Mumbai and Sydney, and told in Hindi and English, the eight-episode series follows newly married but physically separated Indian couple Sridevi and Yash across four years.

Yash (Akshay Ajit Singh) and Sridevi (Shahana Goswami) are introduced by a wedding matchmaker in Four Years Later.Credit: SBS

It begins with extrovert Sridevi, a smart woman searching for love, and introvert Yash, a dedicated doctor driven to succeed by family expectations, being introduced by a wedding matchmaker in their home city, Jaipur.

It then jumps forward four years to the pair’s uneasy reunion in Marlow Beach, a fictional east coast New South Wales town where Yash, working to gain specialist medical training, is gripped with anxiety and guilt.

Sridevi, newly arrived, recognises freedom and opportunities after years living as a dutiful housewife with Yash’s family in Jaipur.

Each must confront the other’s changed ambitions as the story swings back and forth in time to show what has happened over those four years.

“What we uncover when they reunite is the secrets and lies of Sridevi and Yash in the years they’ve been apart,” Gupta says. “It’s not been done with malice. We all have experience of that, presenting the best version of ourselves in calls and Zooms and texts with friends and loved ones.

“It’s something these lovers have done because they’ve been separated while still in their honeymoon phase, just a matter of weeks from their wedding. But, now they have to find their way back to each other and their own selves.”

Gupta, whose career began as a writer on Neighbours (she introduced the first Indian family to Ramsay Street) and includes writing for Bump, Home and Away, The Heights, Doctor Doctor and The Unlisted, says Four Years Later was inspired by stories and feelings she accumulated while growing up in Australia and rarely seeing herself represented on screen.

Akshay Ajit Singh and Shahana Goswami in Four Years Later: love is not always perfect.Credit: SBS

She was also keen to subvert Western concepts of arranged marriage while exploring a passionate love story.

“I once met someone who had waited six years for his wife to come over,” Gupta says. “He was the barista at my first ever TV job, and I remember being there after she finally came to Australia. It just blew my mind that he had to wait six years. And then, when she got here, it was like his life finally began.”

Having been brought up on Bollywood cinema, and experiencing her own romantic ups and down, Gupta also wanted to show the realities of expecting a happy ending.

“Love is not always perfect,” she says. “It’s not always dancing in meadows. It can be really hard, really painful. This show is a real love story with challenges and flawed characters who make mistakes.”

Along the way, pivotal characters help Sridevi and Yash’s individual evolution. Actor Kate Box, most recently seen in Deadloch on Prime, plays cafe owner Gabs, who becomes a friend and mentor for Sridevi. Taj Aldeeb, an actor and radio presenter on ABC Classic, is Jamal, who forms a close friendship with Yash.

For Akshay Ajit Singh, being cast in the lead role of Yash was life-changing. “It has been profound,” he says. “Yash is a simple guy. He wants to make his family happy, to support and be a pillar for them. He marries the love of his life and comes to Australia to find employment and do his specialist medical training. But, it’s the transformation he undergoes once he comes here that is the most beautiful part. He changes drastically.”

Singh avoids spoilers about Yash’s evolution but keenly underlines the rare focus of his role. “It explores vulnerability in men, which is something we don’t do enough,” he says. “Men don’t always have to be macho. A balance of feminine and masculine makes, I think, the perfect man. Even though we have completed filming, there’s a part of me still left on the moving train of making this series.

“I’m waiting for that train to stop so I can catch that part of me and integrate it back in my life. Right now, I don’t know where Yash stops and Akshay begins. It’s been so emotionally uplifting. I’ve grown as a human being because of this role.”

Shahana Goswami, who plays Sridevi, praises the quality of the writing. “There’s nothing that’s left unsaid with these characters, whether that’s expressed through their words or their silences,” she says.

“Moving back and forth in time constantly, you’re juxtaposing emotions of today with similar or opposing emotions from the past. It’s all done with great honesty, clarity, precision, but it’s not a dry script. It is full of truth and emotion.”

Gupta is intensely proud of creating a simple love story told within Indian culture in two countries. “It’s a very specific story but I believe a universal one,” she says. “It’s also a specific experience of migration in Australia which is one of the great things about this country, something that is constantly battered by people who don’t know anything.

“A lot of the culture in this story is my life experience, and it’s been great to make sure the attention to detail, the authenticity, is there. It took me a while to grow into having a voice [in TV production]. But I really feel like I have now.”

Four Years Later screens on SBS at 9.20pm, Wednesday, and SBS On Demand

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