Innika, this was truly marvelous. The depth of emotional confrontation in it left me floored.
I don't know where to start. The fact that Shivay sends Anika a bouquet of the one kind of flower she is allergic to showed the distance between the two. He might love her, want to come closer to her, repair old wounds, but SSO is yet to know her. And until he takes a step in the right direction, he will never find the Anika he had thought he had known and been attracted to once upon a time.
The description of a weary Anika dragging herself down those sweeping flights of stairs left me with an ache in my heart. There is something in that image that is so powerful.
The way you turned Om's reception of Rhiddhima's new move against the Oberois into a way to enter his feelings about the one who must not be named, the woman who changed everything for him, shook the very foundations of the world as he had known it, was brilliant. From that point on I was desperately eager to know what you would do with Om and Anika's conversation.
The image of Om churning out those charcoal gray paintings and then shipping them off-- almost a mechanical outpouring of a certain kind of chaos that he wants to ignore, wants to silence and finally has no attachment to-- because they are figuratively him lying to himself, I felt was very powerful. Those black and white paintings would have been him trying to obfuscate the truth which was that Ishaana had called him out on his black and white view of life and deliberately returning to that form in his art was an attempt to hide the truth from himself which was that he could no longer see the world in such strict distinctions any more.
Anika's love, her warmth, that she wishes to suppress, wishes to hide, is there still. And it came out here in the same way it came out in the last two parts as well. Same and yet different. Her concern is something instinctive. And her words of course, as you wrote in the note, it works at both levels. For Ishaana and for Shivay. It gave Om hope both for Shivay and for himself that perhaps not all was lost. And perhaps, it gave Om that push he needed to enter into that maelstrom where the rainbow of life awaited him- - his feelings about Ishaana.
Needless to say I loved it.
CID
