Folks,
Have you ever been at the seaside on a day when, despite some grey clouds on the horizon, there is the sun shining, a gentle breeze blows inland, and the white-tipped waves creep gently along the sand and wet your feet? Nature seems set to overcome any bad weather, to be gentle, balmy and invigorating, and your heart and mood soar in tandem with these prospects.
Then suddenly, without warning, the skies darken. Lightning flashes blindingly in jagged streaks. The clouds gather in menacing formations and the wind blows like a hurricane, ready to carry off anything and everything in its path. The waves, just a little while ago frisky like lambs in a meadow, are now roaring down from the dark sea, high and angry and aggressive. The rain starts descending in sheets.
You look around for shelter but there is none to be seen in the whole wide beach. There is nothing to be done but to run as far away from the lashing waters as you can, and find some place where you can wait out the storm.
This is exactly how I felt after watching Episodes 74 and 75, the ones of Thursday and Friday last. After the balmy delights of Thursday, Friday descended on the unwary viewers like a thunderstorm, with the promise of worse to come.
The CVs did what they could to salvage Chandra's character, but they made Nandini correspondingly inadequate, unwilling or unable to fight back effectively, or at least forcefully, against Chandra's violent tirades and his sneering, intensely humiliating accusations against her. By episode end, I was feeling wrung out and very tired, after watching such unrelieved misery - unbearable on the one side and incomprehensible on the other- and with the prospect of more of the same ahead.
There was, however, one major compensation: Rajat's magisterial handling of the last scene between Chandra and Nandini. But before we move on to that magnificent sequence, we need to grasp the extent of the tragic about turn in events at that point. For that, one has to take a look at the preliminaries, beginning with the state of mind of each of our leads, and then the delightful Episode 74.
Ladies first, so let us begin with Nandini.
The heart has its reasons
Nandini: what love can do: When Chandra insists that love is something that weakens an individual, I tend to agree, and for proof, one has to go no farther than the girl he loves and resents with equal ferocity.
Nandini is by now so deeply in love with Chandra 1 (see my last Mrigtrishna post) that she cannot bring herself to jettison even the insufferably obnoxious Chandra 2.
She has no ego where he is concerned . Just look at her in the corridor scene with him in Episode 71. Any normal girl would have thrown the bag of mudras he offers her back in his face and stomped off, no matter if she was penniless. But Nandini not merely accepts it, but wants to retain it forever, untouched, as a memento, the first and the last thing Chandra has given her. And she holds on to it even when she is so hungry that the sight of the plate of food at the stop makes her lick her lips in anticipation.
She responds to Chandra 2's semi-taunts and his good wishes in the corridor scene with impeccable dignity, and if she weeps her heart out in misery, it is not till he has left. Perhaps her mantra about prem making one strong enough to bear any suffering is also true, for she now has the ability to wrap her misery in emotional resilience when she is not alone.
Again, in that bumpy oxcart, her little fantasy about Chandra having come to fetch her is so moving, so full of forlorn hope, encapsulating all the secret desires of her heart, that my own eyes filmed over, and I am not the crying sort. The small, glad smile when she wakes up and sees him. When she imagines him assuring her Kaise nahin aata? Tumhein is bhawandar mein akele na chhod sakta tha!, and repeating the line he had used earlier, Agar main Chandra na hota, agar tum Nandini na hoti, so hum avashya saath hote...and smiles at him, say ing Mujhe vishwas tha ki tum avashya aaoge!.., one's heart goes out to the poor girl. The way in which she tucks her head into his shoulder and closes her eyes is for all the world like a tired, lost child who is home at last.
Even after she realises that it was a fantasy after all, and despite the horrible way in which he has treated her, her love for Chandra is unchanged, which is why she slaps Malayketu so hard when he talks of murdering Chandra and marrying her. And she is always on the lookout for opportunities to probe Chandra's mind, as when she asks him why he will not go on and leave her in the forest when she can walk no more - Tumhein meri itni chinta kyon ? - hoping that maybe, just maybe, he too cares for her and needs her.
She agrees to stay in Chandra's rooms with him, though she could easily have refused to oblige, for she can now refuse him nothing that he chooses to ask of her. She does not react even when he talks, foolishly and hurtfully, of a vivaah vichhed.
NB: Incidentally, what was that about a vivaah vichhed? Chandra must be suffering from a Jalal hangover and the talaq idea. There was no way, before the Hindu Marriages Act of 1956, that there could be any divorce in a Hindu marriage, just as in the Catholic Church. So much of ill informed nonsense! 😲
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When Chandra tells her, within earshot of daadi, that he cares for her and is proud that she is his wife, the look in Nandini's eyes is inimitable - half shock, half resentful hope. No matter how bleak the circumstances, her hope never quite dies. Only once does her patience crack, and she utters a loud Bas!!, when Chandra harps endlessly about the dhong they are to carry out, but even so, she decides to keep the vrat for him regardless of how he behaves, because she loves him and she wants him safe and sound.
Unfortunately, just like Chandra earlier, Nandini too seems to be tone deaf at a crucial moment. She does not catch the hurt in Chandra's voice when he says that all the charade they are now going thru is manoranjan, kyonki sabi jaante hain ki tumhein mujh mein koyi ruchi nahin hai! If she had been alert enough to have grasped what lay behind that one sentence, much of what happens later might have been avoided.
Unfortunate kink: As for the Malayketu angle, which is like a permanent, poisonous, lacerating burr under Chandra's skin, Nandini was very foolish in letting her frustration and anger lead her to make a false statement to him that she loves Malayketu.
Making such false confessions is by way of being a habit with her, she did the same in the case of Durdhara's fall, and alsoimplicitly, thru her obstinate silence, in the Chhaya-Satyajit affair.
As I had noted in my last post, there is something in Nandini's make up which makes her snap at a point when she can take no more of humiliation, and just wants out, even if this is by falsely incriminating herself in order to put and end to this torture. It is stupid, and she shortchanges herself to no purpose, but that is just the way she is.
NB: It seems there are people who are like that. In Agatha Christie's Towards Zero, which is one of her best mysteries, the central character in it, a woman, suffers from this very syndrome.
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But this was not a minor matter. It was a confession of marital infidelity. That too not in 2017 but in the 4th century BC, where such a confession, regardless of whether it was true or false, would have destroyed the woman's life for keeps.
NO married woman in that era would EVER confess falsely to loving another man.She would never confess it even if it was true. That is why Avantika never comes clean with Nandini about her complicity in Nand murdering Shishunaag, for she cannot bear the idea of facing her daughter after doing that.
Nandini's folly in this instance bids fair to corrode her relationship with Chandra for a long time, especially now with the Roopa factor, of which she knows nothing as yet, in play. If she had only denied the accusation flat out in very strong terms, Chandra would have at least been given some pause, for the Roopa element was not there then. And things might have been much easier for her now when the roof comes down on her, so to speak, in the teej ka vrat affair.
Chandra: Agonising obsession: By the time the last part of episode 75 arrives, Chandra has already flagellated himself to bleeding point, and every fibre of his being is raw and lacerated by the pain of betrayal, a betrayal "proved" by the incontrovertible evidence of his
I have been very harsh with Chandra 2 regarding his decision to banish Nandini from the palace in the middle of the night, with nowhere to go to, running the risk of something truly horrible happening to her - which in fact nearly does, for she does not manage to knock Malayketu out cold (he must be having a very hard head!). She is his wedded wife, and it is his responsibility, no matter how angry he is with her, to ensure her safety. In this respect, he fails miserably, and then he actually stands around reassuring himself that he had done the right thing! Worse, when he learns of daadi's insistence on having only Nandini tend to her, he has the gall to complain that Nandini should have waited till the morning to leave! I really wanted to kick him all the way from Pataliputra to Takshashila, preferably with hobnailed boots. 😡
So I was delighted when Mura, her voice cracking like a whiplash, snaps at him: Kiski anumati se?...adding that Nandini was, in the first place, Mauryavansh ki bahu, aur us vansh ki badi abhi jeevit hai! Kisne tumhein yeh adhikaar diya? And I thought to myself, Good for you, buster!😉
For all that Chandra makes it a point to inform Nandini, once he has located her, that he has come only on account of daadi, and rushes her along on bleeding feet like an army sergeant major, when she collapses, all his hidden turmoil, centred on his growing obsession with her, surfaces abruptly. Rajat is excellent in this snippet, and Chandra's helpless frustration faced with these strange, unfamiliar emotions that are taking possession of him, leading to a rush of words that seems to surface in spite of him, comes thru beautifully.
Of course Nandini, in the time honoured tradition of our films and TV, is unconscious at the time he blurts out this crucial confession. If only she had been awake, and had heard him, we would have been spared God knows how many intensely irritating sequences that we will now have to sit thru. But no such luck for us, alas!
Their decidedly juvenile spats in Chandra's rooms - about his entering without knocking when Nandini is changing, and then about his insisting on blowing out the lights when she (largely to plague him, if truth be told!) wants to read, are amusing. It is also revealing that despite her sulking, she does not march out and insist on going back to her old rooms. Push comes to shove, she is always accommodating vis a vis Chandra.
Revelation!: When she has ended up using him as a teddy bear for the night,😉 part of Chandra's long, revealing soliloquy sounded decidedly unconvincing to me! For one thing, there was no need for him to stay awake to make sure she gets up in time for the vrat, for the daasi turns up like clockwork to do just that. Nor does he quietly ease Nandini off him to her side of the bed. The fact is that he is perfectly happy to be her teddy bear, for all that he seems to be spending most of the night bemoaning this and much else! 😉😉
But the real whopper, which quite took my breath away, was when he said, with apparent conviction: Tum har pal mujhe peedha deti rehti ho, phir bhi tumhein prasanna dekhne ke liye main kuch bhi karne keliye tayyar ho jaata hoon? This was really too much from a man who had just the night before, booted her out of the palace to fend for herself in the wide, wicked world!😡
Never mind, there was another line that made up for this exercise in self-delusion and hypocrisy. This was when he asks himself: Kyon main seh nahin paata ki tumhein mujhse nahin, meri behen Chhaya ke pati Malayketu se prem hai? Kyon mujhe Malay se eershya hoti hai? So there, for all his continued lament about this being his durbalta, we had Chandragupta Maurya's incognito hriday laid out, at long last, for our inspection!😉
I was considerably amused by Chandra's failure to retort , when Nandini complains about his having been so nikat to her while she was asleep (at least she did not accuse him of ashobaniya vyavahaar!) that it was she who had fallen asleep hugging him.😉
He seems to have been taken aback by her saying that , and his response is initially matter of fact. But the sense of rejection, and the hurt that comes with rejection, seeps thru when he makes a sarcastic remark about his having amused himself watching the changing expressions on her face in sleep, and even more so in his parting line: Jab sab jaante hain ki tumhein mujh mein koyi ruchi nahin hai..
Nandini, having of course failed to grasp the very obvious undercurrent beneath that remark, merely repeats her standard line about his ghrina for her, and wonders at her own decision, despite that, to keep the vrat for him. Chandra did the same earlier vis a vis Nandini. Sometimes I feel like washing my hands of this extraordinarily dense couple!
So now we arrive at the delightful Episode 74, the deceptively reassuring interlude before the storm broke about our ears.
Mesmerised absorption: The correct word to describe how Chandra looks at Nandini, almost non-stop, right thru the Shiv pooja ceremony would be nihaarna.
There is a total, almost unblinking absorption when he gazes at her face, as if drinking in every minute change of expression, every shade of emotion.Her initial hesitation when asked to sit down next to him, the deep shraddha with which she sings the Shiv-Parvati bhajan, her turning towards him as she comes to Mere man mein kya hai Bhola jaan gaye, and then smiles slightly to herself, the open, delighted, childlike pleaure that lights up her eyes when she comes to the Bhang chadhaya, Shiv ne use apnaaya. The open gaze with which she regards him when he is feeding her and then when she is reciprocating, again after some odd hesitation. The way in which she looks away when he gazes fixedly at her, only to come back to his face when he has turned away.
One can literally see the change of mood in Chandra from the bitter parting line with which he left their room after waking her up. Byt the time Nandini is hitting the high notes at the end of the bhajan (Shweta does the lip synching perfectly), the images that flash across his inner eye are all of a Nandini who is his true helpmate. Who fights at his side against his enemies, who cradles his head in her lap as she struggles to save his ebbing life, who touches his wound with gentle possessiveness as she begins to explain the beneficent properties of peedha.
Perhaps this magnetic pull, the magic that is sucking him in, frightens him anew, which is why he tries to get out of participating in the shivlinga sthapana, only to be dragged back relentlessly by the combo of the priest and his daadi.
But once there, his absorption in Nandini takes over anew, and he spends more time looking sideways at her than working on the shivalinga, so much so that one is surprised that the task gets done at all! 😉
It does, but not before we get to see a most unaffectedly charming snippet, when Chandra wipes a blob of mud off Nandini's cheek with the back of his hand. The infinitely gentle care with which he does it, and the exchange of nods between them when the mud is gone - questioning on hers and vigorously reassuring on his - were so delightful ki hamara to hriday prasanna ho gaya!
Caring, and love, are often more appealingly conveyed thru such little gestures than thru overt sensuality, and the CVs need to be congratulated on this exquisite little sequence. There is so much of a sense of belonging together in it that it was no wonder that Malay looks as if he had bitten into a particularly sour lemon!😆
It is almost as charming when Nandini, after an initial instant of hesitation, reaches over to touch and hold Chandra's arm as he is performing the pooja, and he then holds the kumkum thali as she applies it to the shivalinga.
Finally, when Nandini responds to daadi's instructions what she is do next - wearing the outfit and the jewellery Chandra has gifte d her, touching his feet and taking his blessings - with a ready nod and smile of acceptance, the look on Chandra's face - of subdued gladness and evident contentment - mirrors his inner feelings to perfection. At that moment, all is well in his world. It is just a fleeting shot, but Rajat brings out the inner landscape of Chandra's mind flawlessly. Sometimes, such fleeting moments of excellence are as impressive as the grand, bravura scenes, and this was clearly one such.
His foster mother's subsequent babbling to him about his prem for Nandini being plainly visible on his face, however, sets off the old alarm bells ringing in his head all over again, and the magic that had pervaded his whole being for this interlude of enchantment seeps away in an instant. The old Chandra is back.
Here too, the single shot of him - nodding reassuringly at his foster mother while at the same time reacting in near shock to what she reveals about the transparency of his feelings for Nandini- is is a little piece of perfection.
So we move on, and disaster strikes out of the blue.
Catastrophe
I am not going into anything that led up to Roopa's sudden sashaying down the palace corridor towards Malay's rooms, followed by a jealous Chandra, nor into the scene between her and Malay. So we arrive next at what I will call the thali jhatakna segment.
The most remarkable bit there was the horrified, almost paralysed look on Nandini's face as the thali goes flying thru the air, and her terrified look as Chandra rails at her. The way in which she swallows convulsively , her Adam's apple working in her throat , as when he accuses her of having kept the vrat for someone else. It was beautifully done.
It was also revealing that even in his towering rage, when Chandra turns back and sees Nandini collapsed on the floor, there is a flash of panicky fear on his face. It lasts only till he reaches her, but it is there nonetheless, an involuntary reminder of what she has come to mean for him.
I shall pass over the chandra pooja ceremony, and Chandra's prolonged pause before he finally blesses Nandini with an oddly phrased but, under the circumstances, entirely appropriate Prasanna raho! Except to note that as she looks up at him after touching his feet, she looks exceedingly pretty.
And that Helena, in the row behind Chandra, looks lost and disconsolate, as well she might, seeing that her Mamma dearest's promised ploy to sabotage the vrat has failed!
The storm breaks: So we arrive at the piece de resistance, 08:31 minutes of high voltage drama that turns both Chandra and Nandini inside , and leaves them emotionally in shreds and bleeding inside.
It begins with deceptive quiet, however, as Chandra's mock applause brings confused apprehension to poor Nandini's face. There is lava bubbling underneath, but at this point, Chandra's face reflects only smooth, smiling sarcasm as he gets set to quiz her into confessing the "truth". And this time, even I could not skewer him for his behaviour, for the CVs have done him a great favour, they have anchored his rage on the foundation of what he has seen. That this too can be mithya is not something he can be expected to know at that point of time.
As he gets her to state that she kept the vrat since it was her duty as a wife, something startling happens. Chandra begins to laugh. It is not the laughter of mirth, anything but. It is the laughter that comes of distilled bitterness that can find no other outlet.
The mock hilarity continues, and becomes searing as he goes on : Avashya iska kaaran prem hi hoga, hai na?, and moves to embrace her, a gesture clearly meant to provoke a rebuff, and to get Nandini to abandon what he sees as a pretence and to come clean.
Caught in a trap: As he taunts her, his expression now shifting from sarcastic amusement to livid anger in his over bright eyes, about the prem ka saagar overflowing from hers. Avashya... tumhein meri chinta hai.. prem karti ho mujhse, hai na? , Nandini, caught between a rock and a hard place, is trapped.
For she cannot bring herself to confess that yes, she loves him and that was why she kept the vrat. I would not blame her for that. Seeing the way in which Chandra has been behaving towards her of late, she is naturally afraid that he will deride and mock such a confession as well, and this something she cannot bear, to have her most tender, secret sentiments thus defiled. So she retreats into the shatru mantra, and walks straight into the trap he has set for her.
Chandra, who has been waiting like a hawk zeroing in on its prey, now pounces ferociously on the hapless girl. Tumne vrat rakha. Vrat rakha na? Uska koyi na koyi kaaran to hoga, kisi na kisi ke liye to rakha hoga?
Vile accusation: While she struggles to find a way out of this trap, his accusations become suddenly much uglier, and utterly incomprehensible. He accuses her of being promiscuous, of having a string of lovers of whom Malayketu might be only one. Now she was engaged to Malayketu once, so Chandra's suspecting , this time after seeing "Nandini" with Malay, that she still loves him is at least understandable. But where does this other very distasteful accusation of wholesale promiscuity come in? She has done nothing to warrant it, and it reflects very badly on Chandra that he descends abruptly to this level. 😡
All that one can say in his defence is that after having come to believe, at the Shiv pooja, that she had kept the vrat for him because she cared for him, the shock of actually "seeing" that she had been cheating him all along is so terrible that he has temporarily lost it.
He can no longer bear to manhandle her as he used to do before when in a rage with her, so instead he hits out at her with the most wounding accusations he can think up, and this is what he comes up with.
Nandini's face is ashen, her eyes brim over with unshed tears, and her voice becomes hoarse and almost suspended as she asks: Tumhein lagta hai ki maine vrat uske liye rakha hai? Not that this needed asking, for he has said as much to her earlier, after hurling her pooja thali away. But she has to say something, anything at all, when faced with this horrendous taunt.
The trap becomes tighter as, enraged by the sneering parallel he draws between her father and herself, Nandini snaps back at Chandra about his own three marriages. In an outburst of feminine anger at the perennial discrimination against women, always held to higher standards of morality than men, she gives him yet another opening to accuse her of wanting to be polyandrous. And yet another opening to demand that, while she could marry anyone she pleased, she should leave Malayketu alone.
For all that she is unable to cope with Chandra's aggressive bullying, with his hard edged sneering Kya karogi? Kar kya logi?, when she finally retorts that she will not stand for any insults against her father, for all that she gives him an opening to once more accuse her of wanting to be promiscuous, I was glad that Nandini does retort at long last. Glad that one could see a renewed glimpse of the strong princess who can stand up to anyone and anything when things become intolerable.
I only wish she could have slapped him really hard when he made that vile accusation against her. He deserved that and more. 😡
But alas, Nandini is not the slapping kind. Instead, her face awash with pain and her eyes brimming over, she voices her disgust at his behaviour: Kitne ghrinit ho, Chandra! Tumhari soch par mujhe ghrina aati hai..And she lists all the ugly things he has said to her, including his linking her, his own wife, with his brother-in-law (of course here she forgets her own exceedingly foolish false confession that she loves Malayketu).
The moment of truth: As she goes on, Chandra is watching her with deep set eyes that are pools of lambent, suppressed rage and disbelief. Looking at those narrowed eyes in a hard, rock-like face, one senses that something is going to explode very soon. And explode it does, as she stops herself in the nick of time with Phir bhi main.... We know what she would have said had she continued. But it is Chandra who picks up her unfinished sentence. Phir bhi main kya, Nandini, phir bhi main kya?
Then comes the moment of truth, straight out of the horse's mouth, as they say. Tumhare sthan par koyi aur hota, avashya yeh kehta "Phir bhi main tumse bahut prem karti hoon...Kya kahein, aur main aankh moond kar us par vishwas kar leta!" The right side of his mouth twists in a bitter half smile as he mocks himself and his own weakness for this girl who, he believes, cares nothing for him or his honour.
Listening to him, I was reminded of a lovely couplet about just such a bitter, helpless lover unable to get over a faithless beloved.
The last tirade: When Chandra finally mentions her having crossed the limit of shamelessness in going to Malayketu's rooms, I would have wanted Nandini to shout out that she had done no such thing, swearing on whateve sacred symbol she could think of. He would not have believed her, thanks to the Roopa phenomenon, but at least it would have been more forceful that her simply reiterating that she had kept the vrat with poori nishtha, poora vishwas, for his long life, and adding that ghrina aati hai tumhari soch par.
It all comes back, like an LP stuck in the same groove, to the folly of her false confession that she loves Malayketu. If she had only denied it stoutly right at the beginning, as I had noted above, it might have helped.
For one thing, now she could now have sworn on anything Chandra held sacred that she had NOT gone to Malay's room and she had NOT kept the vrat for him. That might have perhaps produced some vague idea of a double in Chandra's mind, just as Mura, faced with a similar firm denial from Nandini about her having smoked, begins to cast about for a plausible alternative explanation and thinks of sleepwalking.
Of course all these might have beens amount to nothing, and Chandra ends up declaring, forefinger raised for emphasis, but in a level tone that belies the bottled up anguish that racks him, that the greatest abhishaap, the worst curse that has befallen him in his whole life, is she, ki mera tumse vivaah hua, ki tum meri patni ho!
Ghrina ka kaaran: Nandini has, till this point, displayed almost superhuman patience and dignity. But faced with this last tirade, she finally cracks. Her back turned to him, her voice almost suspended with uncontrollable grief, she breaks down. BAS! Bas Chandra, bas! Yeh ghrina, yeh dwesh, main aur nahin sah sakti!
Any other man, loving her as Chandra does, and hearing the pain in her voice, would have backtracked. But Chandra is too angry, more with himself than even with her, to be given pause. So he goes on, and the words that tumble out, almost involuntarily, against his own will, are as if they have been torn out of his innermost being, and soaked in the bitter anguish that pervades his whole soul.
About the times when he hates her, jab vivaah ka shool jo prati din mere seene main chubta hai...when she pretends to be a good bahu in front of his family.
And the hardest of all, jab daadi ma ke saamne mujhe yeh kehna padta hai ki mujhe tumse prem hai. His voice falters and stumbles on this last line, for he knows that he hates her the most for this because it is the truth. So he tilts his head and strives to emphasise it all the more.
But he does not stop at this point. There is something that is choking him, calling out to him to voice it, to say out loud what is the real reason for him to hate her. So he goes on, and affirms that it is not because she is Nand's daughter, nor because he was compelled to marry her. Nor even, he adds - when she latches on these points and seeks the real reason for his hatred - most unwisely, effectively sabotaging his key rationale, because she loves Malayketu.
Now he has been pushed into the corner with no way out, and Nandini, barely an arm's length away, is hanging on his every word. There is a battle on within Chandra, a battle between his heart and his mind. In the end, the mind wins, but not before his heart makes three unsuccessful attempts to prevail.
It is mindblowing, the emotional resources that Rajat brings to this small bit, and to the earlier, even smaller snippet when Nandini pins him down and demands to know the truth. His whole face , his eyes, his mouth, all work in a struggle to control his emotions, and not to expose the weakest chink in his makeup to this faithless Jezebel, as he sees her. In the end, he refuses to answer her desperate query, and effectively walks away, from himself and from her.
We leave Nandini sunk to the floor, weeping her heart out, but still unable to hate the man who has made her life a living hell, because of what she now feels for him. Such is love.
On the other hand we have Chandra wiping his own rebellious ashru, and telling himself that his feelings for Nandini have now become so strong that he cannot understand them. So instead of confessing that it is love, it would be better to declare that he hates her.
As for me, I wanted to clout both of them.😡 Thanks to their cumulative folly, we will surely have to suffer thru God knows how many asinine episodes, with Roopa running riot, more and more misery being piled on Nandini, day in and day out, till Roopa is exposed and Nandini redeemed, probably only after having saved Chandra's life once more, this time from Roopa. Not an inviting prospect!
So let me close with something much more pleasant, Rajat's performance in this final sequence with Nandini.
Scintillating performance: In one word, Rajat's Chandra was fabulous. Not perhaps quite at the gut wrenching level of his Jalal at the end of the Sujamal track ( a mindblowing 11:56 minute sequence that I had celebrated in my Shakespearian Heights post) - where the circumstances were very different - but he ran it a close second.
Morever, there was far more variety in the bitterness his Chandra projected - sarcasm, controlled fury, and in the end, helpless, inarticulate misery that he strove to hide.
It was, without question, a tour de force, and I have had to struggle to find words adequate to describe what Rajat pulled off during those 8 1/2 minutes of screen time, shot almost entirely in tight, unforgiving close ups that only heightened the impact of his total control over his voice, his expressions and his body language.
He was allowed very little physical movement - he did not throw things around or shove Nandini to the other end of the room. There were no props, it had to be pure, undiluted acting. And he pulled it off magnificently.
And as he walks away, his whole face seemed to be dissolving and getting blurred, as if it had been put in an acid bath, a perfect depiction of his state of mind at that moment. This is a new technique Rajat has developed recently, for I have never seen it in Jodha Akbar.
Here, he was lucky in that he had a co-star who was able to keep pace with him at least 20%, for otherwise the whole passage would have been like a one-legged race, which is what had happened to his Jalal in the titanic scene I have flagged above.
OK, folks, this is it for now. I was rather nervous about the last part of this post, for when there are so many expectations attached to something I write, I am always afraid of falling short. I hope this will at least pass muster.
Please do not forget to hit the Like button if you think it is warranted.
See you again soon, hopefully next week.
PS: All the photos here are courtesy my darling Anjali. Thanks a ton, my pet, for putting them up just in time for me to add them to my post!🤗
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