Folks,
I could not understand why the CVs have dispensed with the usual Friday night suspense, but I for one was glad they did.
Samhaar: There was Jodha Begum on the riverbank, hidden behind some foliage, and she had Salima behind her, literally and figuratively. She stretches the pratyancha (string) of her bow to its fullest, eyes glaring in total concentration, and lets fly. Five arrows, shot simultaneously, whiz thru the air in perfect formation, like the Sukhoi fighter jets at the final aerial display at the Republic Day parade. Jodha has obviously expanded the hunar she had displayed at Amer (3 arrows at a time) by 66.67% to make it 5, and all dead on target!
Cut to the boat, and there was Benazir, looking like a human pincushion, skewered by all the 5 arrows distributed over her torso, and keeling over in sudden death, her mouth open in shock and agony. Very filmy, or rather like something out the Mahabharata, but enormously appealing, nonetheless. So much more satisfying than Jodha interposing herself and blocking the kiss, or the pair of them, Salima and Jodha, disguising themselves and tailing Jalal and his khaas tohfa.
There is something in one's psyche, rooted in our epics, that calls, not for the legal punishment of great evil, but for its samhaar. Destruction that is total, swift, brutal, inescapable and for good. The CVs seem to have started out with the Savitri theme , and ended up with a Durga, the Mahishasuramardini, and I loved it..
Post-samhaar scenarios: Now the question remains of how Jalal, who looked totally bewildered and (literally) at sea (well, yes, river, but one has to take a few literary liberties!) , will react to this sudden disposal of his khaas tohfa. Before Benazir was reduced to the aforesaid pincushion, he was looking at her with a very curious measuring gaze. But as she approached him with glacial deliberation for the kiss of death, he looked sort of frozen and unable to move, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a speeding car coming directly at it.
It also remains to be seen if Jodha stands her ground or simply disappears, leaving Jalal to guess what happened : how, why and by whom? The latter option is a non-starter from the point of view of advancing our lo..ong-awaited "epic" love story. If Jalal does not know that is Jodha Begum who has rescued him for the very jaws of death, how will the mohabbat ka sailaab, that Sheikh Salim Chisti proclaims is going to sweep all ahead of it, materialize at all?
So it has to be the former. Given this, I would have wanted Jodha to follow the scenario I had outlined in my last post - to run straight to Jalal, embrace him tightly, and weep all over his blue velvet choga, babbling incoherently You are safe, Shahenshah, you are safe, you are safe, you are safe!!!! (I should actually have had her say Aapke praan surakshit hain, Shahenshah!, but then that is not an exclamation that can be repeated four times and still sound snappy. So I have stayed with the English version😉).
But now, seeing that he is in a boat in midstream and she is on the bank, that is logistically impossible. If she were to hurl herself at him after he had come ashore, it would be anti-climactic.
The third and the worst option would be if he chooses to repeat his fishing expedition in the Agra palace pool, and jumps in to try and pull Benazir's body out of the water into which she must have toppled. In that case, neither of these moving Jalal-Jodha embraces would be feasible. And from my point of view, the whole post-samhaar sequence would have become a (literally!) damp squib😉!
Next, the whole procedure of proving that Benazir was indeed a vishkanya will have to be gone thru . This would be vital for making Jodha's skewering her a justified, preventive execution to save the life of the Shahenshah, and not a cold-blooded murder out of jealousy and spite, which is what Mahaam will make it out to be.. As Benazir would already have been fast forwarded to the particular dozakh that is her due, the only living source of proof of her vishkanya identity would be Zakira.
I thus hope that Jalal moves fast to have her seized as soon as he can get back to Agra. This might not be as easy as it would appear at first sight. Zakira would very likely have already fled, if not from Agra at least from the palace, as she would not be expecting Benazir to come back to the palace after assassinating the Shahenshah, but to disappear by diving from the boat into the water. So Zakira would have been given a specific meeting place where she would join the triumphant Benazir, and no one would know where that was to be .
There are too many ifs and buts, and one can do nothing but wait for Monday. But the saint of Ajmer gave me hope that things will be straightened out between Jalal and Jodha without any further complications, for he could hardly have been thinking of a pancha varshiya yojana for getting them together to begin writing their story on the pages of history in the mandatory sunehre akshar😉!
Jodha and the divine passion: The earlier scene between Jodha and Moti was deliberately revelatory, almost stagily so. It was as if the scripwriters were now determined to force the Jalal ke liye Jodha ka prem card on us, like a conjurer doing a card trick. I had always suspected that it would be so!
Paridhi was excellent as the distraught Jodha, worn out by worry and her escalating fears for Jalal's life. Moti, by contrast, was a complete letdown, her flat, monotone voice reducing her extremely significant lines to something like a school essay learnt by heart.
Jodha's desperation comes across clearly, as her eyes constantly brim over and her voice cracks as she repeats frantically that she has to save the Shahenshah from the vishkanya whom he has now decided to marry. There is no resentment at this decision of his, only a frantic determination to prevent it and save his life.
She cannot explain why she is so desperate, when she will still not even concede that she sees him as her pati. The sophistry with which she seeks to make a distinction between the pati she will not acknowledge him to be, and the sowbhagya chhina whom she cannot allow to be killed, would be laughable if it were not so pathetic and unconsciously moving.
Her refutations of Moti's (flat enough to reduce one to despair. How one misses the old Moti!) assertions that she has begun to love her husband are almost mechanical, and she no longer berates Moti, as she used to, for going beyond her limits and treading on forbidden territory. This Jodha has no thoughts for anyone or anything but the Shahenshah, and the danger that threatens his life, as she curses her helplessness and her inability to avert this disaster.
So much so that she berates her beloved Kanha for being so unhelpful to her in her acute distress, despite all the fervent poojas and the bhog that she had always lavished on him. Kanha, who is a trikaladarshi and antaryami, knows even better than Sheikh Salim Chisti how things are going to turn out. So he continues to smile benignly on Jodha😉, driving her to even more aggressive complaints, and demands that he should protect the Shahenshah from the vishkanya.
By the time Moti arrives at The Shove - the first time anyone has seen this discussed, and so forthrightly, with Jodha - Jodha's mind is so totally preoccupied with the vishkanya that I doubt if she took in much of it. But I am sure what Moti expounded at length - that after that incident, Jalal had been always unsmiling and withdrawn and asantrusht, that she, Jodha, had never been happy either, that Jalal was marrying Benazir only to make Jodha jealous (not true, but it hardly matters in this context), that on his side too it was not ghrina or pratishodh but prem - would have registered somewhere in Jodha's subconscious, to be dug out and dissected later.
The Jodha-Sharifuddin scene when she descends on him without notice in the prison (what kind of prison security is there when beshawled women can walk in and out at will and meet prisoners? ) also seems intended to make just one point : that Jodha loves Jalal deeply and is ready to do anything to save his life. Jealousy flares up in Sharifuddin's voice as he comments on this, till Jodha reprimands him and he reverts to his habitual, ingratiating manner. There is no other noteworthy outcome; the new method of exposing Benazir he suggests, by cutting off her supply of snake venom, might have worked if properly implemented, but that needs time. And after the discussion with the supportive Salima, Jodha realises that time is precisely what she does not have.
Whence, presumably, Jodha's decision to prevent any murderous move by Benazir by shooting at her with enough arrows to make sure she does not survive. Of course it has to be at the very last moment. At one second to doom, to be precise! It is was not so, where would the tension be?
Jalal: Jalal, sadly for him, does not have even a flat voiced Moti, or rather the male equivalent thereof, who could fearlessly hold a mirror up to him and force him to face the truth. Atgah Khan is hardly a satisfactory substitute. So he is reduced to mooning about and remembering the pre-wedding sharts that Jodha had laid down for him. The exchange with Atgah Khan seems meant merely to make the point that Jalal too is very restless and equally uneasy, with the ever present hurt of his rejection by Jodha clouding his zehen like a miasma.
In the scene with Hamida, Salima and later Benazir, Jalal, though pleasant and accommodating towards Benazir, looks detached and weary of his impending nikaah and much else.
This apart, Adiana and I seem to have lost out in our pretzel contest, for Jalal seems to have had no idea that it was Benazir who was Abul Mali's secret weapon, not to speak of her being a zahreeli dosiza. Unless of course the CVs do a conjuring trick next week, and make out that he knew the score all the time and was only stringing Benazir along. It does not seem at all likely now, but then, like Napoleon, the CVs do not have the word impossible' in their dictionary (and it is not a Chennai Express style bakwaas dictionary!😉)
The rest of the episode was nowhere near as significant as the above: the Benazir-Zakira conversations (Zakira seems more dedicated to fulfilling their maqsad than even Benazir!), Benazir coming to ask Jalal to accompany her to the dargah across the Jamuna from Agra, the Mahaam-Ruqaiya love feast (the CVs have now completed their hatchet job on Begum Ruqaiya Sultan, though her fierce loyalty to hamare Jalal is as strong as ever), and finally, the important Hamida-Salima meeting, which paves the way for Salima to offer to help Jodha, and thus for the duo to end up at the river bank that cold winter night.
Miscellaneous: For all her aseem husn, Benazir does not look at all begum-like even in full regalia. I was reminded of the old saying that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
Hoshiyaar seems to still suffer from a terminal case of foot in the mouth disease.
Why on earth would Jalal and Benazir cross the river in a smallish boat with apparently no armed escort? Surely they would have a large enough boat to accommodate them all?
What lies ahead: So we have finally arrived, it seems , at the gateway to the amar prem kahani that we signed up for. At least so I hope. If this too turns out to be a mrigtrishna, it would be a very sad disappointment. But I do not think it will. Not now, not with all the build up by Sheikh Salim Chisti.
It will seem very odd for a while, to have Jalal and Jodha being civil and sensible at the same time, for till now , it has been, alternately, the one or the other, but never both😉. But I am sure we will all soon get used to it, till the next falling out between our duo materializes. Not too soon, I hope!
In the immediate future, one thing is for sure. Jodha, this new Jodha, is not going to be cold or distant with Jalal for not having believed her about Benazir. She will be too limp with relief at his being safe now, and too lighthearted at being freed at last from the crushing burden of the last few days, for her to sulk. But it will be very interesting to see how their first post-Benazir conversation goes!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
PS: I see that there is a strong current of opinion in the forum that the shooting of Benazir is a dream. I do not think so, in good part because of the pointed connect between that and Jodha's 3 arrow display at Amer. If, however, it does turn out to be a dream, any alternative sequence will be far less satisfying. As for me, I have already had a lot of fun with the title and this post!😉
As for the fears that Jodha will not be able to prove that it was justified since Benazir was a vishkanya, Jalal can surely get his men to force Zakira to talk!
Anupamaa
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