Friends, today's episode brought no cheer in the form of any potential resolution of the situation between Jodha and Jalal. The Jodha letter to Jalal still remains in the background where it will probably stay till Rahim gets fully into the picture. Meanwhile Jalal still seems to be in the mood to continue to use Benazir to make Jodha jealous, and it seems to be working slightly on Jodha, but not enough to make her change her mind about surrendering herself to Jalal!
What I noticed about today's episode was that there was a sort of escalation of the track on many fronts. We saw three different conversations of Maham seeking to negatively instigate three different people from three angles. At the same time there was also a sort of slight positive escalation of the situation on the Jodha-Jalal front - there was a bit of welcome thaw in their relationship visible in between their bouts of lingering misunderstanding and anger. But as I said before nothing came to a head and seemed nowhere near getting to the end of the track.
This makes me fearful that this track may not end by this week. In fact, if anything, it looks like Thursday and Friday will also be days of further escalations of the storyline, leaving it to next week for us to see the possible resolutions of the Jodha letter and the vishkanya issue.
Even next week, it seems hard to say how the storyline will shape up, because we have a strange situation where two separate tracks - the letter track and the vishkanya track - are sort of intertwined . Unless both these issues are sorted out, the situation between Jodha and Jalal cannot improve, so it is of no use if one issue is solved while the other festers through the whole of next week.
I am personally getting a feeling that in the next week, the two tracks may progress like this:
Rahim may first piece together the Jodha letter and the truth may come before Jalal and Jodha that they had both had some mutual misunderstanding. But before they can reconcile this letter situation between themselves fully, I think the Benazir vishkanya situation may start to explode. Perhaps Jalal may find out this information about Benazir first - or perhaps Jodha may be the first to know.
The likelihood of Jodha getting to know Benazir's truth first seems more probable. Today itself there was talk about some harem begum distributing beauty uptans to the harem ladies. If this turns out to be the same Benazir Recipe Beauty Potions sold by Javeeda yesterday (created maybe from the "vish recipe" inadvertently given to her by Benazir's baandhi), it could well be that this potion scars the faces of the few women who use it - and this may alert Jodha to the fact that Benazir is dealing with some poisons.
Alternatively Jalal may himself get wind of Benazir's plots and plans via some other method of his own jasoosi.
The question then arises: what will Jodha or Jalal do if either of them comes to know about Benazir? Will they share this information amongst themselves and thus work against Benazir as a team? Or will they instead try to work quietly without each other knowing ... which may lead to its own new complications in their relationship?
There is, of course, also the other possibility in all this ... that the letter issue may remain unresolved while the Benazir vishkanya issue gets found out first. That would be another sort of hell for us to watch.
As we all sit through the episodes this week and next week, caught between these two tracks, let's look at the four topics that I thought to be slightly important today ...
The way Maham instigated Jalal: its horrible she brought back "Suryabhan"!
We saw Maham take things forward by poisoning Jalal even further against Jodha. She went to his room at night when he was alone in bed, and cried crocodile tears that she was deeply affected that Jodha had thus insulted him openly at the Meena Bazaar.
She hinted to him that Jodha had gifted the cradle at the bazaar with a view to expose the fact that he was unable to become a father and to raise a question in public against his "mardangi"! She further hinted that Jodha was maintaining her anger and enmity towards Jalal as revenge for the killing of her erstwhile fiance Suryabhan by the Mughals during the Amer war!
Whether it is all working really on Jalal is not clear, because I was not sure if he was really worried about the Suryabhan issue or the mardangi insult ... even when he told Maham that Jodha's cradle idea was no good and something needed to be done about her, he did not look all that perturbed by what Maham had told him. He seemed alert but not alarmed!
I actually thought he found this Maham argument about his mardangi handy later - when talking to Jodha to accuse her. But his real anger on Jodha seemed less about the mardangi insult and more about that spurning that night!
I also found it interesting that Jalal did not seem touched on the Suryabhan issue - and neither did he bring it up with Jodha at all, so we have to wait and see if it has affected him at all. If it has affected him, it may well become an issue after Rahim solves the letter misunderstanding. Jalal may at that time realise Jodha did not write words of love for him in that letter but he will then start feeling jealous of her past love for Suryabhan. (Suryabhan is of course dead, and so not an active threat to Jalal, but he may feel jealous nevertheless.) Hope we don't get a role-reversal jealousy track at that time!
The way Maham instigated Ruqaiya: did Ruq look bothered at all?
Maham tried to work on Ruq today telling her that she wanted Ruq and Jalal to be a closer couple without the interference of Jodha in their lives, but this Jodha was indeed continuing to be a thorn in Ruq's flesh. What was more, Maham said Hamida was indirectly hinting that she thought Jodha would be the ideal begum to give Jalal his waaris and not Ruq, and that's why she gave her khandaani haar to her as a sanket of her wishes.
It was interesting that Ruq asked Maham to leave her alone as she went into deep thought. She later told Hoshiyaar, that while it was true that Jodha and Jalal were at loggerheads, it was highly unlikely that Jalal would allow himself to get a waaris from a baandhi like Benazir. So Hamida's hopes of Jodha bearing the waaris may be right. But even so Ruq herself need do nothing to separate Jodha and Jalal since Maham had an axe to grind against Jodha (for Adham's incarceration) and would do the needful. So Ruq could just enjoy the fun!
Despite all this talk between Ruq and Maham - and then the talks between Ruq and Hoshiyaar - I still get a kind of strange feeling about Ruq that I cannot quite explain. If you all noticed, while Maham was trying to instigate her against Jodha, there was a frisson of alarm in her eyes, but she then chose to let it pass. Then again when Maham mentioned that Hamida herself was trying to push Jodha into the waaris-bearing role, there was again a sort of sharp look of fear in Ruq's eyes, but again she let it pass. In the end when she talked of how she needed to do nothing since Maham would successfully separate Jodha and Jalal for her own reasons, the words were there ... but the look in her eyes did not seem to quite match her words. There seemed to be something that suggested that Ruq may not be all that she seems. I have no idea what she is really feeling, but there is some ambivalence there for sure!
The way Maham instigated Benazir: who is the puppeteer and who is the puppet?
Maham went up to Benazir in the night and congratulated her on winning the Kohinoor title. She then went on to say "You have to get closer to Jalal and Jodha stands in your way. Jalal has no heart, so you have to work on his mind and use your jism. Just do as I say, be my puppet, and follow my instructions, and I will help you achieve your ends. "
But unknown to Maham, Benazir and her baandhi were already in talks that Jalal was getting closer to Benazir moment by moment - and although he was not quite in her bed yet, he was surely getting there. The baandhi seemed also to imply that both she and Benazir were getting closer to their "real goal"!
So when Maham completed her "puppet dialogue" and left the room, we saw Benazir saying to her baandhi "This woman thinks I will be her puppet, but the moment is not far off when she will become my puppet!"
All this kind of double-meaning dialogue clearly is hinting at the "vishkanya project" to be executed by this Benazir and her baandhi, in tandem. But folks, I am now getting a suspicion that this baandhi may have unknowingly already betrayed Benazir - ultimately leading either Jodha or Jalal to the truth about Benazir. There's a reason why I say this.
In one of the past episodes Javeeda is seen asking this baandhi for Benazir's "secret beauty lotion recipe" ... and then Javeeda is seen selling this recipe to consumers at the Meena Bazaar. One therefore presumes that the baandhi did give some recipe to Javeeda to enable her to produce that lotion in bulk at the bazaar. So then why was the baandhi trying to tell Javeeda that what she was selling was not really the beauty lotion but something else?
Could there have be some switch of recipes somewhere between the real beauty recipe and the possible poison recipe of Benazir ... and did the baandhi perhaps give the wrong "vish recipe" to Javeeda only to discover to her alarm that Javeeda was selling it by the bottlefuls at the bazaar to all and sundry? And again: is there a connection between Javeeda's lotion and the beauty uptans being distributed by a certain begum to the other harem ladies today that Moti was telling Jodha about? Will the harem ladies who use this uptan then find themselves harmed and raise the alarm about the uptan/Javeeda lotion?
I am just wondering: while Maham and Benazir are thus talking about each other as puppets, could the baandhi actually turn out to be the inadvertent puppeteer leading everybody else in the harem, including Maham and Benazir, into a puppet dance?
Seesaw of feelings on the Jodha-Jalal front:
Aside from these attempts of Maham to escalate the situation, on the Jodha and Jalal front there seemed a quasi-thaw and a quasi-anger ... a kind of seesaw of feelings going on.
Jalal was seen in his bed first, imagining Jodha tucking him into bed and putting him to sleep ... but also swearing contuinued "na-insaafi" against her just to get back at her for her wrong-doings to him. Jodha was similarly seen ranting to Moti about his behaviour at the bazaar, but also unable to sleep herself, thinking of him.
There was also that nice scene in the garden when the precap of yesterday happened. Jodha came up to a Jalal, looking angry with her, but not exactly able to sustain that anger with any conviction! He told her he didn't want to talk to her for her insults at the bazaar. She said she had come to give him mandir ka prasad - which after refusing he then accepted from her with almost a boyish sullenness, but not real enmity. She asked what his crib against her was - and he explained it was the cradle gift that questioned his mardangi. She said "You have eyed it all wrong. And what's more your eyes even wrongly saw that pathetic painting by Benazir as good and awarded it". He said she too had eyed him all wrong, if she thought she could insult his mardangi with the cradle. She had not seen him as her husband with rights over her!
All this talk in the garden then led Jodha in her room at night to think over what Jalal said - and she finally planned to meet him the next day and talk to him to correct their mutual "wrong-eyed assumptions". This intended meeting seems to be what is in the precap of today, which further continues this seesaw theme of half-thaw and half-anger between them. She gifts him a lovely shawl, he expresses appreciation for it - but says he will be giving it to Benazir who needs it!
At this rate folks, tomorrow also looks very much like an up-and -down episode. Although I like the Jodha-Jalal scenes better than all the rest of the scenes we are forced to watch, even their scenes are getting a bit tedious if its all going to be just one jealousy-prodding idea after another by Jalal all the time! I am desperate for a change of scenario, aren't you all? How long will this cat and mouse game continue? Does anyone have a guess when Rahim will get active or when Benazir's cameo role contract ends?
Let me end this post folks by sighing and saying with some sadness that I don't really see an end to this whole saga of the two intertwined tracks - letter and vishkanya - till the end of next week. What do you all think? Has anyone got a more optimistic idea?
Cricket
Anupamaa
