Friends, I expected that yesterday's episode would be largely devoted to the sorrow in Jodha's and Jalal's heart at the loss of their loved baby. But it came as a total surprise to me that the whole episode was devoted to nothing but that. There are some two or three points about this episode that I want to especially highlight in my analysis today ...
The acting was superlative from both Paridhi and Rajat!
Folks, it was really, really heart-breaking stuff to watch a mother, from such close quarters, lose her everything as her child is taken away in a shroud for the burial. I thought the stages of grief that Paridhi essayed were tremendous. She was initially in the bed in shock and daze. Then she got up to see the shrouded baby and again denial set in. "How could you dress my baby in white?" she asks Jalal. But then within seconds her mind shifts from hallucination to reality. "You are the Shahenshah with mighty powers, please bring back my baby to me!" she says showing clearly that a corner of her mind has registered the death of her "ansh". She kept hovering in that nether land between acceptance of death and disbelief of death and it takes great acting not to overdo this phase. She could have easily looked like a melodrama queen ... but instead she played her part so well that I cried with her and I am sure many of you did too.
Later when Mansingh carried the baby away, the wail of agony she let out was blood-curdling. It was like someone was tearing her from limb to limb. He eyes were throughout in a transfixed daze ... and for Paridhi to have maintained this body language of wildly swinging grief with such consistency through the whole episode, without overdoing it at all, and yet pulling every inch of feeling from our hearts into the moment, was to put it mildly simply spectacular.
It was grief with an understated elegance, heartfelt and yet with just that touch of restraint in the acting that prevented it from going over the top. And then when the baby was gone from the room, she sat by the empty cradle almost using the cradle as the symbol of the baby she had lost. Jalal knew it for he came and hugged her as close as he could, murmuring consolations to her as her agony ebbed and flowed alternately. But he was astute enough to have the cradle removed fast from the room lest it should become the surrogate for the baby and Jodha should start hanging onto the cradle for dear life! "I am sorry Jodha Begum," he said "but I had to do it to help you let go!" And then he proceeded to slowly help her make the long walk back to reality.
All this while, as Jodha was hugging the baby in the shroud and then refusing to let it go, Jalal was reflecting every nuance of her pain on his face. It was like a mirror image of two faces, hers and his, reflecting the identical emotions - only thing was that her body language was openly grieving while his body language was closed and private in its agony. You know, folks, if you see some of the scenes in that phase of the episode, it looks like his face was a carbon copy of her feelings, except for that small touch of restraint in his face while there was a greater readiness to be open in her face. He was just feeling her every feeling - and like it always happens, we feel worse when we are already hurting but someone we love is hurting even more. We start feelings their hurts in empathy and thus take on twice the burden of sorrow. Jalal was like that. With every scream or anguished whimper of hers he was feeling twice the feeling - his own and hers!
Finally after the baby left the room, Jalal saw Jodha sitting by the cradle, and he hugged her and didn't let her protest much as the cradle was removed from the room. But then he said something so beautiful that my throat had a lump in it. He told her why she still had a reason to live. He told her he was the reason for her to live. "I wish God would take me away too!" she said not for a moment thinking of anything but the baby gone from her. "If you go I have nothing to live for. So I wish God would take me too" he said simply but sincerely. I thought that sequence in the whole episode as the two of them hugged and realised they need to live for each other was the most poignant moment of the whole 22 minutes. Paridhi and Rajat were sensational. (I don't even feel like calling them Jalal and Jodha, for the acting was so pure, so natural and so devoid of pretence that it looked like the real people were feeling real feelings and I could not see the divide between acting and real life!).
And in all this let's not forget the baby that died, leaving all of us feeling the torture of the needless and cruel loss of innocence. It all brought to mind one quotation:
"And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief".
In that tiny sentence is all the wealth of feeling in the world of the parent who watches the infant son or daughter leave the world. If you are a truly feeling parent and have just learned to love the beauty of a new birth in your life, how tough it must be to say "You were so lovely and yet why did you have so small a life?"
The other spectacular scene was when Jodha got angry with Kanha and said "You have taken away the light of my life, so why should I light a diya for you?" That was a dialogue with such a wealth of anger, helplessness and frustration that it was so patent to see that Jodha was shouting at Kanha knowing full well that she could never ever leave her faith in him. At about the same time, Jalal was walking out of the palace hugging to himself the baby in the shroud as other men followed him to the burial. We could see his teeth were clenched to suppress the desolate feeling inside him. Who was the more tortured in that moment it was hard to tell.
There were many exquisitely painful moments in the whole episode and I may have missed out on some of them. But no doubt by evening this thread will be full of other people's posts reminding me of this moment or that moment that I left out. I guess like Jalal and Jodha I too am in a haze and don't feel so clear about the tiny individual moments of the episode because of the fog of the whole cloud of sad feeling shrouding my mind!
The contrast between this grief and the grief after Maham's death!
I want to lightly touch upon the stark contrast at the way grief was shown yesterday and the way grief was shown in the Maham death episode. When all of us saw the Maham death episode we thought it was a bad faux pas by the Director of the episode to make Jalal bawl and howl and cry loudly, and start singing a lori. It was meant to show the breaking heart of a man who only remembered the boy in him and cried for the loss of a mother, but it looked bad on screen the way it was executed.
Here yesterday was the complete antithesis of that Maham death scene. If ever I see a death scene on TV this is what I want to see - like yesterday. We had a mother who was so bent in grief and yet even as she sometimes wailed in pain loudly and sometimes went soft with a choking voice, she never once let the emotions look unaesthetic on screen and neither did she reduce the moment to melodrama. It was just pain, pain, pain ...
And Jalal on his part acted as the perfect force of restraint on Jodha never letting her go overboard. He kept her sorrow contained, absorbed all the loudness of it, gave voice to her whimpers and whispers so that she could let out that which was stuck in her, and he was in every way the bulwark against which she leaned for comfort and solace.
In the Maham death scene, Jodha was just made to stand near Jalal as he howled away, and instead, if they had only reversed what they had done yesterday - if they had allowed Jodha to soften Jalal's torture and calm down his ranting and absorb all his bursting out without control - what a scene we would have had?
I couldn't help but notice the difference in execution. It made all the difference yesterday to let Jalal become the restrainer and the absorbent one dulling the hard edge of pain for Jodha. Jodha should have been allowed to do the same for Jalal in that Maham death scene, don't you think?
Was a whole episode needed for just the grief after the death?
I must address one question here on which I got a lot of PMs. So many people asked the same question: "Granted the whole episode was powerfully sad and heart-shaking, but was a whole episode needed just to show the minute-by-minute torture of two parents watching the departure of their dear baby in a shroud, ready for burial? Was it not too much of pathos in one whole episode of nothing else?"
Folks, my answer to that is that we have to probably see the episode in the context of what is to come next. The Creatives needed to increase the pain of loss in Jodha and Jalal to make the events following the death of Hasan more dramatic. Ruq and Zeenat as the deadly poisoning duo needed to have the look of really heartless and wretched souls, so this depth of feeling in Jodha and Jalal was needed to show the contrast between the hero and heroine and the vamps and their subsequent evil deeds and emotional cruelty.
What is likely to happen now? Here my hunch ...
Spoilers (and the precap) suggest that Ruq will very briefly - just for one night - allow Jodha to have the baby Husein to help Jodha lose that sharp edge of sorrow she feels at the loss of Hasan. But by morning Ruq will be back to snatch the baby again away from Jodha. Jalal seeing how much difference having Husein has made to Jodha's emotional recovery from loss, will then tell Ruq that she should give Jodha's baby back to her for Jodha was after all the natural mother ... but Ruq will point-blank refuse (as per promo) since the baby she has is now her ticket to the MUZ, and she can see her way clear to the title now that Jodha has lost Hasan.
I believe that at this stage Jalal will take Birbal into confidence and the two of them will decide to apply the reverse farman on Ruq the minute she trips up on some small matter of care of her baby. Ruq will make some mistake and will then have to cede the baby to Jodha as per the reverse farman.
What will Ruq do wrong that the baby will revert to Jodha? It is my feeling that Zeenat will make a try in giving poison to Husein while he is with Ruq and since Jalal is keeping an eagle eye on Ruq and the baby he will catch Zeenat in the act. Zeenat will thus be unable to poison Husein. Jalal will immediately extract the truth from Zeenat that it was she who killed even Hasan with poison. Thus using the reverse farman that Ruq had hired a murderess as dai maa, and endangered Husein's life, Jalal would take the baby back from Ruq and give Husein to Jodha.
A miffed and thwarted Ruq will then decide to start dosing Jodha with small doses of daily poison in her food to prove that she is also a bad mother to Husein ... so that Jalal is forced to give Husein back to her, Ruq! But instead of the posion doing major damage to Jodha, it may kill Husein who is being fed by Jodha! Jalal and Birbal may trace the poison in Jodha's food back to Ruq and see that in her haste to become MUZ she has made Jodha ill but killed Husein. Ruq may herself blabber that she was not intending murder she was just after the audha. This could lead to Ruq's capture and punishment.
(I know Maddy believes that "jaan begum Ruq" will never get caught, but I beg to differ. She WILL get caught this time, only thing is I am not able to predict how long all this will take.)
Yesterday, folks I called the Zee man and fired the s**t out of him for giving me an October 3rd deadline for the Ruq bhandaphod and he merely said "Sorry behenji, my dates could have gone a bit idhar-udhar, but Ruq bhandaphod is sure!" I didn't know what to get more angry about ... his blithe and shameless "sorry" or his calling me a "behenji"! Anyway just for the record he still swears on the Ruq bhandaphod, so I thought I'll share that for what it is worth!
All that happened in yesterday's episode:
Jodha is asleep in a daze in bed. Jalal is very distraught and sad and worried about Jodha. The hakima says "She will wake up soon but please don't show her Hasan's body or she will break down again". But just then Jodha wakes and sees Hasan's body covered in a white shroud.
She gets up and grabs and hugs the baby and scolds Jalal for dressing him in white clothes. She is in deep denial and has occasional bouts of reality. She tells Jalal "You are the Shahenshah and can do anything. Bring back my baby to me please." Jalal hugs her very close and says "Jodha Begum, face reality ... our baby died". But she wails in agony.
A maulvi says some prayers as Mansingh carries the baby away. Jalal is barely able to hold back Jodha. Meanwhile Zeenat tells Qasim privately that one baby is dead and soon the other one will also be. Qasim says he has got revenge from Jalal for his father's one lost eye and soon he will get revenge for the other eye. Zeenat says kiiling Hussein will be easier as she is his dai maa and has easy access to him.
Jodha is sitting next to the empty cradle in her room as Jalal tightly hugs her in her deep sorrow. She says there is no Balagopal in the cradle any more. Jalal says all things pass and she will get over this too. He signals to Moti and Zakira to remove the cradle from the room. When the cradle goes Jodha wails in agony again.
Jalal says "Forgive me, Jodha Begum, as I had to make you let go." She says "I wish god had taken me too." He says "How can I live without you. God should please take me too if he takes you." Hamida comes and tells Jalal its time up. Jodha knows it's for the antim sanskaar. She begs to go with Jalal and hug her baby for the last time. But Muslim law forbids women at the burial.
Jalal with a very heavy heart leaves Jodha and his mother together. The ladies watch from the upstairs verandah as Jalal carries his shrouded baby out of the gates followed by all the maulvis and men. Jodha is still screaming in agony "hamara baccha, hamara baccha" as the men go out of sight. Moti brings water but Jodha refuses.
Then in the room Moti lights Kanha's diya but in fiery anger Jodha blows out the diya and shatters it. She shouts at Kanha "How could you do this to me? I will never again ask you for anything or do your seva! You have taken the light from my life so I will never again light your diya." Hamida, Zakira and Moti are agonised to see Jodha's fierce anger and loss of faith in God.
In the precap, Ruq has given Husein to Jodha to feed but then she says "Bas, it's now time for him to come back to me. He prefers not to sleep in someone's godh but only in his cradle". She snatches Husein from Jodha and takes the baby away without an ounce of feeling ... as Jodha is left looking dazed and bereft.
Today I expect the promo scene to happen, so we'd better watch out for the next promo very soon after that!
I think by Thursday we should have a new promo out!
Anupamaa
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
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