3 Storeys, as the title sort of suggests, is effectively a set of three short stories, with no (or little) relation to each other, besides that they’re all set in a three-storeyed chawl in Mumbai. Which brings me to the traditional definition for what a chawl is – a series of single-room tenements, or ‘kholis’, lined along a common balcony, with a toilet, usually on every floor, that is shared between residents.
The film doesn’t strictly follow that description – kholis seem more like one or two bedroom-hall-kitchens (BHKs in Bambaiya). Consequently the characters’ socio-economic class don’t particularly match their dwellings, or each other’s, either. But then again, that is not so hard to imagine in a severely space-starved Mumbai, where you could be a fairly well-to-do lawyer/engineer, and still live in a slum, while the rest of the world peers into concrete huts for poverty porn.
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