Friends, again another episode passes on expected lines! More than half the episode went in watching the ridiculous malyudh between the beefy-bodied Adham Khan and the lalkaro-fying pehelwan, as Jalal sat in his golden gown, giving varied facial expressions ... all of which ranged from the utterly silly, to the seemingly concerned, to the delighted glee at the end of the fight! Jalal looked totally like an "extra" in the whole of the episode while all sundry actors got centre stage!
There was nothing much to the episode on any of the "tracks" we were expecting to be resolved. The Jodha letter to Jalal hangs in mid air, and the paigam from Ben to Ammaji remains in Hakim Mirza's pocket ... meanwhile we saw only two things yesterday. One, Adham and his mother managed to get Adham to fight and vanquish the pehelwan and extract a promise from Jalal that hereafter all Adham's rights and privileges will be reinstated in full. Two, Sharif, hearing of Adham's freedom, itched to get loose himself, heard of how Abul Mali was taking systematic steps to eliminate Jalal via Benazir, and decided to write a paigam to Jodha - so that he could make Jodha a mohra in his own strategy of freedom first and then attack on Jalal.
Besides this the only other small scene was the Hamida-Jodha scene discussing how clever Jalal was to release Adham to save the Sultanate's face ... and how wonderful a Wazir-e-Aliyah Maham was to insist on Jalal that he should release Adham. Jodha was duly impressed with Jalal's "astuteness" (hear, hear!) and she ends up with a sentence like "I am less jealous of Salima or Ruq but I sure am feeling jealous of Ben!"
In another very small scene, Adham is seen doing a slip-catch of Benazir - till his mother catches him flirting and reminds him that freedom from jail has been won at great cost and should on all accounts not be trifled with.
There was also another very tiny scene which may have some significance later. Javeeda is seen telling Adham that by sleeping on a bed of white flowers (as per the Hakim's orders) the ill-effects of Benazir's beauty potion can be removed. Wonder who else will need this antidote of flowers next? Anyway never heard of such an antidote!
Okay, on this insipid note let me just detail the two "highlights" of the totally timepass episode yesterday ...
The Adham fight and the medals galore from the begums!
Adham Khan is suddenly annoounnced by Atga as the third contender against the wandering pehelwan. The great man-mountain Adham apppears in the arena in chains, giving slanty-eyed supposedly menacing glannces at one and all. There are flashbacks to the scenes where Maham asks Jalal to field her son against the pehelwan, and then Jalal asks Ruq to give her permission to free Adham.
The "clever-sounding" Adham then makes a small sharth before Jalal before he engages to fight. He asks to be placed at Jalal's feet where he ensures that he names all the privileges he was stripped off and he asks if he will be reinstated as a wafaadar if he wins? Jalal agrees to his conditions!
Then the malyudh takes place. The poor pehelwan gets "washed out" by Adham literally. I use the word "washed out" with full meaning. In South India on the river banks you will see able-bodied women washing clothes by swishing them over their shoulders and bringing the clothes down hard on the rocks by the river below them. Time and again the clothes will get hit mercilessly upon the rocks with huge over-the-shoulder swishes till presumably the dirt leaves the clothes out of sheer fright! That's what happened to the pehelwan.
Then finally Maham signals to her son to sever the throat of the pehelwan and to spare him no mercy. Adham obliges by squeezing the pehelwan so hard that he extracts one tonne of tomato juice from him! And so Adham wins. Jalal asks his begums one by one to hand over medals of victory to Adham, and then gives him back his entry passes to the Diwan-e-Khas and Diwan-e-Aam, returns his Malwa subehdari too him and lets him sit at his usual seat in the sabah, as Maham kisses her son with grateful tears. All well that ends well, and Adham is now free to do even more evil than before - which Jalal tells him specifically not to do! Miinutes later a drunken Adham is chasing after Ben the baandhi, but that's another story ...
Sharif itches to get out and writes to Jodha to twist her arm!
Meanwhile inside jail Sharif is fumig at the easy release of Adham thanks to Maham. He wonders how he too could break free, when a sipahi under his thumb comes with outside information! The sipahi tells Sharif all that has happened at court so far ... the arrival of Ben and Hakim Mirza, the pehelwan etc etc. Sharif puts two and two together to get twenty two and his angry scowl turns into a feral grin!
He senses that Abul Mali has put into action his long-planned strategy against Jalal and has sent all these people of his one by one into Agra. He then decides that he will make the hapless Jodha his mohra to gain his own freedom. He writes a paigam to Jodha that there is danger to Jalal's life, and that the matter must be kept secret and so Jodha must meet him alone at the jail whereby she can get this vital information to save Jalal.
The big blooper I noticed, as many of you would have, is that the paigam Sharif was supposed to write on was "already written on". A bit of camera laziness showed us the already filled paigam. Anyway let's assume Sharif then wrote it afresh. When Jodha got the paigam she was seen in two minds whether to meet Sharif as he requested at the jail, and what might be his chaal. She was also concerned with Jalal's life being in danger (as she herself tries to tell Jalal in the precap!). Do you alll suppose that Jodha will take Hakim with her when going to meet Sharif in jail? And further will Hakim annd Sharif exchange "glances". As you all can see I am still not able to think of Hakim as a good guy! I have my suspicions on him also.
Anyway at the fag end of the precap, Ben is seen telling her baandhi that there was no time left and she had to strike at Jalal pronto!
Now today I wait to see: Will Jodha manage to convince Jalal to free Sharif? Will Jodha take the Ben bite that is meant for Jalal and thus save Jalal's life? Or will it just be that Jalal is already pre-warned and waiting for Ben to strike? Or will Hakim solve the riddle in time to arrive himself to help Jodha save Jalal?
Someone please tell me that with this Friday episode Ben will be out the picture, Sharif and Adham will be on the loose but not yet ready with any new strategy against Jalal, and things will go back to "some normal" at Agra - normal enough, hopefully, for the Jodha paigam to Jalal to be pieced together by Rahim next week?
Spoilers say Hakim may help Jodha-Jalal to come together, so if all this happens next week it should be good. I am assuming that all those Creatives who were on vacation for the New Year would have returned and the story will get back some semblance of normalcy?I want to tell the Senior Vacationing Creatives that in their absence the Junior Creatives have been living out their own "vishkanya lip bite" fantasies via Jalal, which I strongly condemn!
