In Hulu’s crime comedy series, 'Deli Boys', Poorna Jagannathan ('Delhi Belly', 'Never Have I Ever') delivers a standout performance as Lucky Auntie — a sharp-tongued, glamorous, and formidable figure who serves as the only maternal presence for the Dar brothers, Raj and Mir, after their father Baba Dar's unexpected death. As the late Dar patriarch's closest confidante and long-time business partner, Jagannathan's Lucky is deeply entrenched in the family deli business, which serves as a front for a clandestine cocaine operation.

Lucky is a significant departure from Jagannathan's previous roles, such as the nurturing single mother Dr Nalini Vishwakumar in Netflix's 'Never Have I Ever'. Unlike Never Have I Ever, Deli Boys takes the trope of South Asians as model minorities and turns the concept on its head. In Lucky, Jagannathan embodies a darker, more villainous character that defies earlier depictions of 'Desi' women in mainstream Western media.

"I like that it (Deli Boys) took the Deli trope and turned it on its head," Jagannathan says. "I've been longing to do the un-model minority story, because those are the stories that just don't see the light of day. And frankly, I feel like there's so much comedy gold in that territory. But what I love is that it takes the Deli, the person behind the Deli counter, the 'Apu' trope, and flips it and makes it into something very unexpected."

A stylish stone-cold killer and the de-facto leader of DarCo's cocaine business, Lucky was originally written as a man. Abdullah Saaed, the creator of Deli Boys, changed the character to a woman only after attending a Geena Davies talk. But Jagannathan slipped into the character as though it was her second skin and made it her own. She watched documentaries about Griselda Blanco, Phoolan Devi, Indira Gandhi, and eventually found the character in 'Housewives of Orange County'. It was a slow process, but it produced one of the most memorable female characters we've seen in recent years.

"I didn't find Lucky Auntie for a really, really long time," Jagannathan says. "I think we were a week away from shooting. I went to see my mother in Toronto. We shot in Chicago, so I saw my mother, and then we went to a restaurant, and we met a Parsi woman in there. She was lovely, and she was with her two very grown sons. She was lovely in just that beautiful way that Parsis are: so charming, so, so charming. And then she turned around and wiped her grown son's food off his mouth. I thought there was something about that gesture that I thought would be great for Lucky Auntie. And I wanted to find that softness and nurturing for Lucky because what is built in is the masculinity. She never lost that DNA. I wanted to bring out the more nurturing side."

A sort of spiritual re-enactment to this anecdote about the Parsi woman plays out near the end of the first episode when Lucky Auntie shoots a man, seemingly in the face, and immediately turns to the Dar brothers to wipe away the blood splatter from their stunned faces without missing a beat. In a way, this particular scene encapsulates so much of South Asian womanhood, but it also mirrors how the modern world works: women are the skillful go-getters and problem-solvers who are also proficient at making infantile men feel important. This is at times all the more stark within 'traditional' South Asian households where the rigid boundaries of patriarchy and matriarchy blur and blend together.

"We have to clean up men's shit day in day out, make them look good all the time. The writers' room is filled with a bunch of Lucky Aunties —women who've been in the business for a really long time," she says. "Michelle Nader, who's the showrunner, Jenni Konner, who's a producer, who have had to navigate a very male industry and always make their male bosses look great. And yet they do the work and carry it on their shoulders."

"So there was like a real sense of Lucky Auntie being a culmination of the women in the writers' room," Jagannathan says. "It's their story. I don't know if this is making sense, but I think we've always been in a matriarchal society. It just has a very strong patriarchal patina on top of it."

With the growing popularity of shows like Never Have I Ever, Bridgerton, and now Deli Boys with audiences across the world, that patina is finally wearing off. Gone are the demure, devout, sweet South Asian mothers and wives of yesteryear films and television. Jagannathan's Lucky Auntie is a badass Brown crime boss unlike any other we have ever seen on screen before, and her arrival marks a shattering of so many stereotypes about South Asian women.

"Every minority has a certain trajectory when it comes to storytelling," Jagannathan says. "When we first started off looking at South Asian stories, there was a lot of parents versus their kids, arranged marriage storylines. And then with shows like Never Have I Ever, it moved into a much more nuanced portrayal of us. And Deli Boys has the privilege of subverting everything. So Deli Boys doesn't have a message. It's not about our racial identity. It's not about identity at all. The fact that we're Pakistanis or portraying a Pakistani family is just a complete addendum. And it adds so much humour to it. But what we are is that we're a mob family. It took us a while to get there. But I think Deli Boys was one of the best examples of what that could look like for our community."

"The popularity of a show like Deli Boys signals something huge," Jagannathan says. "The writers are now there. There are so many fantastic Asian and South Asian writers telling our stories now. And there's so many different senses of humour out there, so many points of view, so many different stories to tell. So shows like Deli Boys just open the door. Even Avantika (Avantika Vandanapu) in 'Mean Girls', right? She just talks about being ditzy and how awesome that is and how un-stereotypical that is, because we're always portrayed as brainiacs. Each person, each writer, and each show pushes us further."

Deli Boys is currently streaming on JioHotstar in India.

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