First things first, folks. Like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, let us begin at the end.
Going by the precap, the Great JA Milan seems round the corner. Or, to be precise, just round the tree, which seemed broad enough to shield apni Jodha, even though she is no Kate Moss in terms of her breadth😉. What she was doing traipsing around a forest in the Mughal area, and all by herself, is a mystery, but then she is given to turning up in strange places- on a boat at midnight with her not-yet-fiance, at a Kali mandir just when a Mughal posse attacked it, and now behind a tree with the Big Bad Jalal the Jallad on the other side of it.
We now have 2 choices as to the likely outcome:
(a) A tiger will turn up on cue and attack Jodha, whereupon Jalal will decapitate the tiger - he has a yen for decapitating things - with his shamsheer, and earn Jodha's reluctant gratitude. She might then abandon her yen for his head. This would seem too pat for credibility.
(b) More likely, the two will come face to face, and indulge in some fiery exchanges that would put the Mahaam Anga-Bairam Khan duo to shame. This should be great fun, and Jalal will have a much better frontal look at the veerangana in case he decides to get another picture of her painted, for the pleasure of reducing that too to ashes.
Now let us get back to the episode per se. Newton's law of gravity mandates that anything that goes up has to come down. But he would never have imagined that this would apply not only to apples, but to the quality of TV serial episodes as well. After yesterday's humdinger of an episode, I was all set for a let down today, and lo and behold, it arrived on cue!
Mahaam Anga -Bairam Khan:The best part today was really the vicious spat between Jalal's two mentors ' Bairam Khan and Mahaam Anga ' a no holds barred affair that drew blood on both sides, but left the lady on top once more. The two hissed and snarled as they circled each other like a pair of cobras jockeying for position to strike first. Bairam Khan's savage threats pointed to a loss of self-confidence, and the only time he managed to get under Mahaam Anga's skin was when he dismissed Adham Khan, her pride and joy, as utterly worthless and bound to self-destruct. Her snarl then would have done a tigress proud!
By the end, as he was storming out, Bairam Khan shot himself in the foot yet again by mentioning a pilgrimage to Mecca. He meant it for Mahaam Anga, but I am sure she will find some way to speed him on that way pretty soon.
Uff, Yeh Mohabbat!: The rest was an extremely labored and hamhanded attempt by the scriptwriters to drive home the need for Jalal to begin believing in mohabbat.
It was bad enough when they showed the Shahenshah, with Begum No.1 in tow, actually going to the prison where the devious Fatima, and her paramour Bahadur Khan, were trussed, hands up, like Veeru in Gabbar's den in Sholay.
Now, I am not questioning the appropriatemess of the death penalty for them. What Fatima had tried to do was a very serious crime ' a fraud on the Emperor by attempting to pass off an illegitimate child of hers as his, and thus (though this seems unbelievable in historical terms) as the heir to the throne. This would be tantamount to treason, a capital offence without question. But it is ridiculous to show the Shahenshah turning up to execute the sentence personally.
Next, just like in the movies, who turns up at the last second, just as Jalal is getting set to swing his shamsheer at Fatima's neck? No prizes for guessing it. Of course it is his lachrymose Ammijan, Hamida Banu Begum, looking, as always, melancholy and ready to burst into tears. She intones Ruko! , halting her son in mid swing. Then she proceeds to bore him, and us, to tears with a homily on mohabbat, adding that Islam forbids the killing of an expectant mother, a sin which would call forth a curse on the perpetrator that would condemn him to be childless all his life.
It is this last that halts Jalal in his tracks, for like most sceptics, he is not firm in his disbelief. I for one cannot understand why a 21 year old (or less) is so worried about not having a child yet. He has at least 40 years more to get himself some. But he seems as obsessed with the idea as a TV soap bahu after a decade of childlessness.
His Ammijan makes matters worse by propounding the utterly laughable theory that no man can become a father without mohabbat. For two to become three, she asserts, in a very dubious exercise in creative arithmetic, the two first have to become one. And that cannot, she declares with all the assurance of a prophet, happen without mohabbat.
If this was true, there could be no better family planning method in a country like India, where 90% of marriages are still arranged, and necessarily without any mohabbat between the couple😉. I would also doubt if there was any mohabbat between Humayun and this depressing wife of his, and still they produced not only Jalal but a posse of other kids! And for a queen, inured by royal training to political marriages of expediency, to mouth such rubbish is even more ridiculous than it would be in an ordinary woman. But then Ekta does not believe in subtlety; she prefers to drive her points home with a sledgehammer.
Jalal, not being burdened with any knowledge of arithmetic, seems foxed and dismayed by all this talk of one and two and three, though he is visibly disturbed by the warning. But it is Ruqaiya, who can surely count accurately, whose face is frozen in despair as her mother in law holds forth to her son. The inarticulate agony in her eyes, and the tears that, later in her bedroom with Jalal, threaten to overflow and betray her weakness, touched me to the quick. To be childless is, for her, a tragedy too deep for tears.
Jalal's and Ruqaiya's reactions were proof positive - both in the prison, and later when Jalal revives the issue with Ruqaiya in their bedroom and wonders if they both are childless because there is no mohabbat betweem them - of the power of fear, no matter how ill-founded and irrational, to corrode and weaken commonsense and rationality.
To drive home the point about mohabbat, Fatima, when she is released, tells Jalal, in the most dismally senti lines heard recently, that she would pray for him to find it with someone who would be dearer to him than his life.
While Jalal snarls his dissent, Ruqaiya, understandably, looks appalled. She has it difficult enough as things are - what with baandis producing kids while she has none, and other haremites forever yapping at her heels - and the idea of having to handle a mohabbat mein deewana Jalal must have seemed like a nightmare. 😉
So, when faced later, in the privacy of their bedchamber, with a Jalal visibly worried about his Ammijan's homily, actually wondering if the two of them had no kids because they had no mohabbat for each other, and asserting his total disbelief in any such feeling strongly enough to hint at the exact opposite, Ruqaiya panics and does a Bairam Khan. Just as he scores a self goal by mentioning a pilgrimage to Mecca, Ruqaiya now does herself a disservice by proposing a hunting trip the next day.
So on to the forest at Agra, and the Great JA Milan tomorrow. As Gen X says, ungrammatically but energetically, Enjoy!!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
PS: Ruqaiya's real problem is not that she does not love Jalal. She does, very much so, and one has only to look at her eyes in the prison scene to grasp that. It is rather that, given his sharp and oft-reiterated aversion to mohabbat, she dare not tell him so. She fears that if she does confess to such feelings, she would lose out on the admiration and closeness he now has for her because he sees her as a soulmate, who thinks and feels just as he does.
CID
Udne Ki Aasha
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