Who is Rumi in Tooth Pari: When Love Bites? We explain who the character is, why she’s important, and who plays her. There will be spoilers for the Netflix show.
Tooth Pari: When Love Bites is a Netflix TV show from India, written and directed by Pratim D. Gupta, and is all about vampires.
Here, vampires are cast out of society and are forced to live underground, away from humans. There are some that break this rule, one of them being the show’s protagonist, Rumi.
Due to an unfortunate accident, she’s forced to see a dentist and falls in love with him.
But the show is more complicated than that, and Rumi has a tragic past that gets brought up during the course of the season. This past is crucial to understand as a tease at the end hints that it might become even more important in a potential season two.
Here, we explain who the character is, her past, and which actress plays her.
Who is Rumi in Tooth Pari: When Love Bites?
Rumi is the main character in Tooth Pari: When Love Bites and she is a vampire. When one night, she is sneaking about the human world, rebelling against rules that say vampires must stay underground, she attempts to bite a would-be victim, only for one of her canines to break.
This forces her to take a trip to the dentist, something that humans don’t want to do either. Once there, she falls in love with her dentist, Doctor Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari).
If visiting the human world to prey on the inhabitants is against the rules, then it’s unsurprising that falling in love with a human is an even bigger deal.
Eventually, the two sides agree, allowing Rumi to keep seeing Roy.
What is Rumi? Is she a vampire?
Rumi is a vampire, but she wasn’t always that way. Audiences learn that she was once a normal human being with human problems. One of them, in particular, may come back to bite her in the neck (metaphorically speaking). When Rumi was in college, she fell madly in love with a guy and accidentally became pregnant with his child.
He didn’t love her back and left her and her child. Rumi was then forced to have an abortion by her parents, who then married her to an abusive man. She had a second child with him, but he died very early on.
All of this trauma was too much for Rumi to take, so she attempted to drown herself. But, just as she hit the water, she was bitten by a vampire. Their blood mixed, and she was reborn as an immortal creature of the night.
At the end of the season, Adi Deb, a character keeping humans and vampires apart, reveals that one of Rumi’s daughters actually survives and that he knows where she is.
Now that all the other vampires fear Rumi, he will likely use Rumi’s daughter as leverage against her in a future season.
Who plays Rumi in Netflix’s Tooth Pari?
Tanya Maniktala plays Rumi in Tooth Pari on Netflix. She’s 25 years old, and has appeared in several shows like Flames, Feels Like Ishq, and Chutzpah. She’s best known for appearing as Lata Mehra in A Suitable Boy and Ishita in Flames.
The actress is from Delhi and has recently completed a degree in English Literature. In 2021, she was one of ten selected for the first BAFTA Breakthrough India initiative, showing promise for her acting career going forward.
