21/9 Dragon Club: Eye of the Tiger

Hey all! Sorry again for being MIA but this graduate school business is no joke! Then again, it is new and interesting trying to write a take so much after the episode, and much after every one else who has described it in more and better ways than I could conceive; that means you, Jyo, Zet, Kirthi, Indu (welcome back, btw and I hope you are feeling much, much better!), Red, Meena, Priya, who wrote longer takes and those who put their briefer insights on along the way. I must say this thread was a treat to read! Now since all of you covered the major themes of the episode, and most of the details so well, I thought I would just pick up two things that particularly intrigued me in the episode, and talk about them in detail: Arpita's words in the dream and the theme of Vishwas that ran through the episode.

This is the colour symbolism I observed for the Arpita dream sequence soon after the episode:

I think Arpita's white saree represented Yash's widower status, and his love for Arpita which was totally pure... because she is dead and his love became more like worship. On the other hand, Aarti was wearing red, the colour of love, passion, life, anger and pain, as was Yash who was going against his promise to Arpita when he was boxing. The white represented the purity of his love for Arpita, the need to maintain this purity implied that he could never love again and stopped him from accepting Aarti's love and beginning to love her in return. BUT the turning point was that the Arpita in the dream took her white saree and wiped Yash's blood with it, thereby giving him permission to "stain" his colourless, "pure" life with all things red. I loved the symbolism there!

To me this was a moment, for Yash, when Arpita freed him from herself, and to us viewers, the moment when Yash's conscience allowed him to accept that what he had done was not a mistake. What intrigued me here though was the fact that he said sorry, I had to do this. It was uncertain whether he was asking forgiveness for entering the boxing ring or for the "paap" he had committed with Aarti in Mumbai and though this is essentially a cop-out answer, I think it was both. He was basically asking forgiveness for going so far away from her and for having to put himself into this degree of pain in order to reach her again. I have this theory that Yash is able to sense Arpita most strongly when he is in the most pain. Whether the pain is physical or emotional, it is in that haze that he is able to actually hallucinate her form and feel her near him. The moment that comes to mind is when Palak is upset about Aarti redecorating her room and lies listlessly on Yash's lap and tells him she misses her mother. Yash's own grief sort of washes over him two fold in that moment because of his empathy with Palak and he is able to conjure Arpita up on her favourite bench and just talk to her, to relieve himself of all the burden he is carrying. Then again, during Palak's birthday his memories of Arpita's last day are painfully triggered by Aarti trying to imitate her, and his pain allows him to hallucinate her once more. In short, he feels such acute pain sometimes at the memory of Arpita's loss that he goes a little cuckoo and the line between reality, where Arpita is no more, and his mind, where she is very much alive, starts to blur.

But in Mumbai he had completed the process of detaching Arpita's memory itself from pain, which was represented by the scene when he tells Aarti that her reframing Arpita's picture has made it even more beautiful. That is why he seeks out physical pain now because it is his only access to Arpita, to blur the lines between his mind and reality...and as we saw it was only when he was on the brink of passing out that she emerged from the shadows, getting ever so slowly illuminated. This made me think how hard Yash had to try and how far he had to push himself into the realm of physical pain to be able to enter this haze one last time and get that final nod to move on, something that he too wants desperately deep down.

How ironic is it that this last meeting takes place in the very place Arpita had forbidden him to be? It sort of reflected that making love to Aarti was something that his and Arpita's relationship had precluded, and yet only in the eye of his emotional storm, by crossing over all his pain and torment, and confronting the darkest side of himself, does he find his peace in this meeting with Arpita. When he asks her forgiveness, she tells him there is nothing to forgive...he hasn't done anything wrong, either by entering this fight or by succumbing to his feelings for Aarti, but now he has to fight. In short, he hasn't done anything wrong so far but he would be if he lost this fight and did not take a stand for his love with Arpita, his children and Aarti's trust. I found these three things that she talked about really intriguing so I thought about them one by one:

For Yash and Arpita's love: One of Yash's biggest beliefs is that love only happens once. He can sense himself starting to fall in love with Aarti; he feels a lot of the same feelings for her that he once did for Arpita which is why he accused her of taking her place. And so this breeds a crippling fear in him. If he falls in love with Aarti, what does that mean about his love for Arpita? Was it not real? So in some ways he is guilty about cheating on her physically, but more than that he is ashamed of the way he insulted there love by feeling that way about another person. That is why he has to fight for their love, for it to have meant something in his life, and not fade away from his and the family's memories. In Yash's mind there was only one way for their love to live on after Arpita died and that was for him to be faithful to her for life. But this dream made him realise another way. For Yash and Arpita's love to have meant something, and something good, Yash has to live, he has to be better for having loved and lost Arpita and for that he has to find himself again...and to find himself, he has to fight this fight and win it. If Yash were to die in this fight, it would forever be a stain on the love that he and Arpita shared, and riddle it with negative associations of grief, madness and tragedy. By winning this fight he gets another chance to make his love with Arpita mean something, to keep her memory alive and to make everyone remember her with fondness and love, rather than any worry or resentment for what her loss did to Yash. I thought that was a beautiful sentiment.

For the kids: I think this was the most literal of the three reasons Arpita gave Yash, and I thought it was interesting that the reasons sort of came in order of priority. All this time his first priority was to fight for his and Arpita's love, to validate it despite the fact that she was no longer in this world and he had technically given someone else the position of his wife. The kids and their concerns came after that, in the knowledge that they were passably taken care of physically and he wasn't really allowed by the women of the house to connect with them on any deeper level. However, he is a committed father and he knows that he promised Ansh he would play the game with honour.

BUT, like Kirthi and Indu so astutely pointed out (benefits of writing your take so late...you get to incorporate and analyse everyone else's insights!) Yash only looked up when Arpita mentioned fighting for Aarti and her trust. I think the reason for this was that Yash had already been fighting for his and Arpita's love, and for the children ever since she died. That was pretty much all that was keeping him going...and he felt like he had lost that fight when he gave into his baser desires and slept with Aarti. He needed something extra in this fight to get him up again and make this fight worth it and that one all-important factor turned out to be:

Aarti's Trust: If you think about the history of this word faith through the show, you will see that at no moment has Yash been allowed to take Aarti's trust for granted. From not long after the moment he met her, he has found reasons or simply followed his instincts to trust her implicitly. He knew almost right away that she would be the right mother for his daughters, he knew that she would not threaten Arpita's place in his life, and he knew that she would be an excellent mother and bahu for his family. This is also why he flips out entirely when she breaks his trust, like when she tried to become Arpita, or now when she crossed, and allowed him to cross, all the boundaries of their relationship. On the other hand, Aarti has never trusted Yash right off the bat. He has always had to win her trust, starting from the declaration that he wanted nothing more from this marriage except a mother for his kids, to Ansh's kidnapping to the roller coaster at Essel World. The reason that it was so much easier for Aarti to fall in love, among other things, is the fact that she expected a Prashant around every corner and got a Yash, who instead of breaking her faith made it stronger and stronger each time he was confronted with a challenge. And it has been equally important for Yash to create and sustain that trust in Aarti.

Looking back at the Yash-Ansh bond, I think the real thing started only after they ran that race together. Before that, it was more a sense of duty on Yash's part because he had committed to being Ansh's father and was determined to fulfill that in every way. What really made him act the way he did during the kidnapping was the fact that Aarti had trusted him, after he shouted at her about being over-possessive, and allowed him to force Ansh to go to school. He needed to keep that trust intact and so he went all out to save Ansh. What bothered him most when she wasn't there when he woke up, was how he could have failed as a father that made her want to leave. Even though he probably doesn't think about it too much, deep down he knows that her trust was hard-fought and won and he does not want to risk that at any cost...in essence that means one thing: this relationship means something to him because according to SP later on, and Shobha before him, this trust is the foundation of any relationship.

Now what I think is interesting about the theme of vishwas being brought up again in a big way, after a long time, is that just as Yash fights to preserve Aarti's trust in him, Aarti's trust gets completely shaken. Moments of innocent companionship, maybe at best tinged with a little anxiousness and excitement, were completely butchered and misinterpreted by him. It's true that Aarti was on a mission in Mumbai, but in the process she opened up a lot herself. Like she said, she wore salwars, she laughed, she challenged Yash, she asked for bhutta, she asked to go to a pub, she hung out with Aman with and without Yash there and it was all fine with him. Because of his behaviour every time she tested the boundaries, she trusted him not to read anything into her changed habits and comportment. But he did, and he read into it in the worst way possible. He made it sound like she did all those things just to seduce him, to trick and manipulate him, and all the self worth, the confidence and the happiness he had given her by accepting her for exactly what she was, went out the window. By tarnishing those moments, he is indirectly taking away every good association she had with the baby now growing inside her, and so she no longer has the courage to reveal it to him when she wanted to do so immediately, the minute she found out. By promising that she would be whatever he wanted her to, Aarti was basically saying that she didn't trust him any more to accept her for what she actually is...and that breaks my heart.

So that is why it struck me when SP gave his vishwas lecture, because there is almost none left in this relationship. They are both fighting to maintain the other's faith in them without trusting each other first. As a result of the fight, Yash knows he has to live, but he still has not figured out the reason for which he has to live. When Aarti begins to pull away and he senses her loss of trust and therefore the same reticence she displayed at the beginning of the marriage, he is going to understand what his direction is, now that he has passed the culmination of both Arpita's mourning and the guilt of betrayal, and that is to rebuild that trust within Aarti, this time consciously and for keeps, and allow her to be herself once more: the effervescent woman who brought him out of his depression and showed him the light. What I am most excited for is that this time, I do believe the rebuilding of trust and the assurance from Yash's side that he wants her for exactly who she is, is going to involve the Prashant truth. Last time Aarti grew to trust Yash pretty much just for who he was, and so I think never trusted him quite enough to let her past out of the bag. I like to think that it is going to be different this time around if Yash decides to win back her trust consciously and deliberately. I think the pregnancy truth, which I hypothesise he will find out from someone else, and the fact that she didn't tell him is going to be how he finds out about her lost faith. Much excitement and wonderfulness to come!