Friends, yesterday's was a relatively quiet episode which showed different scenes of different groups of people in the aftermath of the Maham exposure. As can be expected at a closed place like the Agra Palace, news spreads fast ... and the fact that Jalal had caught out Maham in the Dilwar-Sujamal episode and found Maham to have deliberately separated Jodha and Jalal from each other, was on everyone's lips.
I had thought that since Mahaguruvaar's episode (today) was going to be the one of the stripping of all audhas and positions from Maham (as per the promo), the Wednesday episode would also be full of revelations leading up to Maham being divested of all her responsibilities in the Sultanate. But that was not how the Creatives were taking things.
We have to still watch the today's episode - to see why, after saying on Tuesday "Keep your positions and your title" Jalal is going to be stripping Maham of all these today. Maybe something will still happen in the early part of today's episode to make the removal of Maham's audha imperative.
In yesterday's precap, Hamida tells Jalal to "act wisely and to keep his head" when dealing with Maham's divestiture in the DEK, so it seems as if some things will boil up early on in today's episode, leading to the promo scene. My hunch is that it may have something to do with Jalal unearthing the persons hidden in the surang after Hamida alerts him about her suspicions.
Since many separate conversations took place yesterday, between different people, all as a fallout of Maham's exposure, I thought I would just briefly go over them and then make my comments on the episode as a whole.
What all happened yesterday:
The episode seemed to start with the way it ended on Tuesday. Jalal was in the DEK with Maham telling her that she can keep her title and her positions but she has irretrievably lost a son! Jalal then goes on to add that it was his bad kismet that made him lose both the people he had so valued in his early life - Bairam Khan and Maham - and that Maham, instead of being a mother who let her son climb her shoulders to reach higher in his life, had actually used his shoulders to grab her own title and positions. In short she had used him and his power as the Shahenshah to feather her nest and that was no decent deed of a genuine mother.
By the time Jalal has finished his speech to Maham, he was a broken man, but she was almost apoplectic. After Jalal left the room, she just sank to the ground in disbelief, living with her visions of how she had saved the young Jalal from enemies in his childhood. But the past was all that Maham had, for the future looked as if it had gone out of her hands!
The news of Maham's exposure in the Dilawar-Sujamal issue, and how she had engineered the separation of Jodha and Jalal through fostering Jalal's suspicions on Jodha's fidelity, became the talk of harem gossip. Hamida, Salima and Gulbadan too were seen thrashing the subject to pieces, with Hamida in a state of some shock and disbelief. She was a bit distraught ... and seeing that Salima alone was standing upright after the shell shock Hamida asked Salima to go to Jalal and to be with him at this difficult hour and to counsel him as best as she could.
Jalal was standing near the tarazu, the one place he always comes to when in conflict. But there was no Jodha there to help him shed his confusion and reach clarity. Jalal was still in the throes of dismay at the betrayal of Maham and the horrendous deed she had done by him - making him deliberately suspect Jodha of infidelity and thus separating him and Jodha with a lot of bad blood between them.
Ruqaiya was with Jalal, but Ruqaiya could not do for Jalal what Jodha usually did. Jalal ranted to Ruqaiya "Why did Maham do this to me, a mother figure I had held in such love and esteem since childhood? How could she separate me from the one thing I loved - Jodha. Why did she do this?"
Racking sobs were shaking Jalal's shoulders and his body was stooped showing his sense of desolation. Seeing him thus cry I thought Ruqaiya would offer solace. Instead she started to cry too out of sheer guilt. She told him something that I never expected her to own up "Jalal, I have to tell you that I too knew one evening before that this Dilawar Khan impostor was a Rajvanshi man in the harem. But I was so jealous of Jodha that I abetted Maham's plot ... for Maham kept saying she was being silent to try and trap this man who may be Jodha's "gair mard". Forgive me for my mistake, please, forgive me."
Instantly Jalal recoiled from Ruq and stood a distance away with his hand raised in accusation. His sense of double-betrayal would not even let the words out of his mouth for he now condemned Ruq also for her hand in all this. Then unable to countenance her face even for a minute longer he dashed Ruq down to the ground and she landed on one of the plates of the tarazu. Ruq barely recovered her stance, a little later, when Salima appears there to see that Jalal was in a worse condition than she had expected.
"Salima Begum, please give me some of your soothing words" Jalal cried to her plaintively, "Tell me something that makes all this bearable". Salima, without even raising her voice, and in a tone meant to bring clarity and peace to Jalal, said without fuss "Don't break down Shahenshah, you have to remember you are a King."
"But I am broken" said Jalal. "Tell me you full name" Salima then said to him. After a moment's stunned pause, he said "Jalaluddin Hohammmed". "No, said Salima "It's Shahenshah Jalaluddin Mohammed', and you should never forget that word Shahenshah' that precedes your name. You have to act now not as the son of Maham but as the King. In fact, just think over this ... if Jodha had been here she would have advised you the same thing, wouldn't she?"
The mention of Jodha's advice calmed him considerably. "Thanks for the peace you have just given me" he said to Salima. "When Maham next faces me at the DEK, she will see the King in action and not the son." Saying so, Jalal left with a new determination, despite his emotional hurts, and Ruq asked Salima with some consternation "Will Jalal severely punish Maham?". Salima replied "I can't say, but I know this is going to be one of the longest nights of his life".
Maham, who had by now reached her room, was slumped against a far wall, sitting on the ground, looking like a sad knot. She was like an automaton, repeating again and again to herself like a maniac "I still have my audha, I still am the Wazir-e-Aliyah. Nothing has gone from me. I am still the same." In between these mutterings, Adham came into her room and had difficulty even finding her huddled in the distant corner. He raised her to her feet, and immediately asked what was causing her this distress. With as much cogency as Maham could muster, she gave him a gist of what had happened ... but in her re-telling of the story she said "I don't blame Jalal. It is that sneak Atga who had filled his ears against me. He was the one who acted as the ferret digging up things."
Adham, who already had many axes to grind with Atga, fumed and fretted and swore to kill Atga. "No, no" said Maham in alarm "we both have got you so close to the takht, you can't do something stupid to sabotage your chances. Leave it all to me, I'll solve it all as I usually do." Adham thinking Maham was now OK, let go of her shaking shoulders, but Maham was not OK. She kept muttering to herself "I haven't lost anything, I have everything. I have my position still ..." Adham intervened to cut this madness. "No mother," he said "you have nothing left. When Jalal lost his value for you, your audha is meaningless" and with that bit of clarity (surprising, coming from him) he left the room.
The episode then cuts to Amer, to the Kali temple specifically, where Jodha has arrived to offer aarti. She bumps into Shaguni Bai there, and is tempted to share her distressful dilemma with her for some counsel. Shaguni does not disappoint Jodha. She starts talking even before she's asked anything "He won't leave you. You will go back to him, in fact you have no choice but to go back to him. Your heart has to be listened to, not your ego."
Jodha interjected, her brow furrowed "But I had to leave that place and him because of the grave apmaan I faced when my charithra was questioned. I feel I did right. But since then there is also some guilt in me as if I have done some wrong. There is no peace." Shaguni then says "You won't be able to stay in Amer for long, you have to go back to your pati. When you will go, only Kali Maa decides. She controls the timing. Think why you were brought her to do that Gangaur Puja. You do whatever your heart tells you to, and Kali Maa will do the rest, the needful". (Alas, those of us who thought Shaguni would offer Jodha a travel schedule were left in the lurch not knowing what would be Kali Maa's "uchith timing"!)
In the precap of the episode, there are two short intercuts. In one scene, Hamida is telling Jalal "Tomorrow at the DEK, choose your decisions with care and use your sagacity.". In another small scene Maham is shown saying to herself "Tomorrow I have to see if he will weigh all my years of loyalty against this one mistake I made."
("Oh my God, Maham," I felt llike telling her, "if only you had done this one small incidental mistake you have some hope. But you yourself have said you were the "serial-saazisher of Agra" and have systematically tried to sunder Jalal from Jodha. Even if you had hurt him you have some hope ... but you have hurt her whom he loves. How can you hope for redemption?")
My comments on this overall episode:
a. In the first place I was setting up my own expectations very high after the previous episode. I thought all of Maham's many saazishes would come tumbling out of the closet - or if not all, at least a substantial number of them. There was still the surang mystery, the dhakka paigam and the Shivani elopement issues to unravel.
I thought, a bit stupidly, that somehow the surang mystery and the Shivani issue may combine (for example, would Hamida tells Jalal about the surang, and would Jalal do a recce of the surang and find Shivani captive there?). But all this was just my feverish imagination because I couldn't account for the baby in the surang, nor did I have a theory of why Shivani may be there without Tejwant.
Then I realised that I was trying to rush things in my mind just to get enough reasons for Jalal to strip Maham totally of all responsibilities on Mahaguruvaar (after saying on Tuesday "Keep your audha and your life, you have lost a son"). Maybe by having too many expectations of yesterday's episode the ultimate airing of the episode made me feel it was a bit too flat and devoid of any real progress in the story.
b. I somehow did not like the tarazu mnemonic to be used for a Jalal-Ruq scene because I have become a bit possessive over the tarazu being used only for Jodha-Jalal scenes. So I didn't like it one bit that Ruq was there in that sacrosanct place with Jalal ... and moreover, I didn't like him confiding his troubles to Ruq.
The only good part of the scene was that Ruq herself then started blabbering and let out her part in the whole Sujamal saga (that she knew that there was a Rajvanshi man impersonating Dilawar Khan and that she was jealous of Jodha and had thus abetted Maham).
At first I thought Ruq would not tell Jalal all this herself, and may in fact hate his crying for the lost love of Jodha. But Ruq took me by surprise. She started crying along with him. On hindsight I feel she was smart to have blurted out everything before Maham exposed her at the DEK to Jalal. So to an extent Ruq has saved her own skin by owning up to Jalal and saying she only abetted Maham because Maham said she was trying to trap the Rajvanshi man into revealing himself to them all!
c. I thought Hamida's reactions to hearing the story of Maham's exposure was a bit tame. Considering the degree of distress Hamida had about Jodha's absence and non-return to Agra, and the way she scolded Jalal about it, I had thought that she would display more vehemence yesterday when she came to know that Maham had separated Jodha and Jalal wilfully. I also thought Hamida would be more concerned that Maham had betrayed Jalal and his love for her as a mother figure. But on both counts, she was a bit too lukewarm, I thought. All that I saw Hamida do was to sink into the sofa and say something to the effect of "Hai, hai, yeh kya ho gaya", which didn't seem good enough for me.
You know what folks, I find it - and have always found it - a bit strange that Hamida takes Jalal's love for his Badi Ammi with so much equanimity. I would have expected her to be more jealous, or perhaps more aggressively loving towards Jalal in order to assert her own status as his real mother. So yesterday when I saw Hamida's relatively reaction-less response to hearing about Maham's betrayal of Jalal, and her saazish in sundering Jodha and Jalal, something looked definitely missing.
Hamida could have shown one of three reactions more strongly:
- She could have felt more dismayed at Maham's treacheryand ruination of Jalal's life.
- She could have felt more for Jodha's separation from Jalal by Maham.
All three reactions were missing. Which brings me back to the point of why over all these years she did not put up any resistance to Jalal's doting on Maham, nor to Maham's inordinate powers in the Sultanate. She was too resigned, too comfortable with Maham and her stature and closeness to Jalal than I would have preferred. But at least I thought her reaction to hearing of how Maham had separated Jodha from Jalal would be stronger. I guess Hamida is a placid disturb-me-not character by Nature? She has raised her voice in anger on some occasions but it has never amounted to much change in anyone in the end!
I guess, as Abhay would say, this is one more nail in the coffin of the Adham-Atga enmity. Poor Atga Khan, his own bad times are approaching and his life is in jeopardy. Fate has hastened his departure by making him the recipient of Ahtmaad Khan and Dilawar Khan's story and put him in the position of further incensing Adham and Maham by sneaking to Jalal about this issue.
The fact that he is closing in on Adham's accounting frauds was already putting Atga in a dangerous position vis a vis Adham ... but now this also? Poor, poor Atga!
