This episode falls roughly into two halves, one in which much happens, and another in which much is realized. I always like to save the best for the last, so let us go to the former for starters.
Aftab ka pehla noor: A dreamy scene, that, the door of that room being unlocked by Hoshiyaar (did Jalal leave the key in the lock? Unlikely. Which means that Ruqaiya has duplicate keys for all the locks in the palace), to reveal Jodha sleeping like a tired child in the aftab ka pehla noor. Whence the Hand of God that cannot be denied.
I will pass over Hamida's gentle reproof to Jodha (but how does Hamida know of the suicide attempt , as seems clear from the conversation? Ruqaiya might have guessed it, and Jalal tells Mahaam, but not Hamida), full of the by now staple Amer ki aan (one would have imagined, seeing the way they all go on and on about it, that Amer was a powerful kingdom like Mewar, which it assuredly was not) and Agra ki shaan, a formulation almost as bad as the Jalal ka sar of recent memory!😉
The one thing that stood out in that scene was the guilty, pleading, shamefaced look on Jodha's face as she stands up to greet Hamida and Ruqaiya. Paridhi gets that to perfection.
Ruqaiya: I loved the way she is shown as being reconciled to Jodha going to Ajmer with Jalal, because she believes in the Pir Baba's edict and is genuinely concerned about Jalal's safety and well being. One could see, from the way he looks back at her retreating form, that Jalal feels the same. This little vignette underlines, after a long time, the special quality of the bond that the two share. Jodha will one day be the love of Jalal's life, but she cannot become the friend that Ruqaiya was and is to him.
Salima: She is like a still, limpid pool, transparent to its utmost depths, with water that is crystal clear and sweet to the taste. She has unshakeable moral certitudes, and it was wonderful to see her setting Jodha right on the Ajmer Sharif issue and, earlier, Mahaam, on the aftab ka pehla noor one.
Of pigeons and barbs: I don't know about you folks, but to me, the barbed Jodha-Jalal exchanges in the garden, which were presumably just before the RK Films logo stunt, did not sound like light nok jhok. Jalal clearly did not want Jodha to come to Ajmer with him, which is understandable. Why would he saddle himself with this unpredictable hedgehog, from whom all he can be certain of is that she will make things uncomfortable for him? (Which, by the way, she does, except that the correct word would not be uncomfortable, but life-threatening).
Plus, he suspects that what she will end up offering there would be not a dua for him, but a baddua. Whence the overt bitterness of his Aap wo aakhri shaksiyat hain jis se hum apne liye dua mangwayenge.
As for Jodha, one wishes that she would brush up on her basic manners and do at least a pranam to her husband when she meets him. The way she stands there, stone-faced, in front of her maids, looks very bad, like a sulky, bad tempered schoolgirl. In fact, Jodha is now becoming that most disastrous of things for a character, predictable, and thus boring. Plus yesternight she looked, in that armour plate-like necklet and her stiff costume, almost stuffed. Her face, set in resentful lines and full of disdain when rubaru with Jalal, seemed to hint at an impending attack of the mumps. Her lovely, big eyes were puffy and narrowed.
Finally, she invariably has a fluent, self-justificatory, soul-improving lecture ready for Jalal. Today's was about the Raja-praja equation, really meant to make it clear to him Yeh mat samajhiyega kis hum wahan aapke liye prarthana karenge. Hum to, Mughal sultanate ki Begum hone ke naate, aapni praja ki bhalayi ke liye apne poore man se prarthana karenge. Iske maadhyam se aapka bhi bhala ho jaata hai to humein koyi aapatti nahin.
I too wish, like Tripti, that he had not caught her when she slipped. But then, the JA budget would have come under stress, with the additional cost of a grand new joda for Jodha, so I suppose that was out!😉
I begin to think Suryabhan was better off sar ke bina, all things considered. Bechara Jalal to phans gaya; gale mein akti huyi hai yeh Begum Jodha, ne nigalte bane ne thookte bane.😉
The precap: Yes, yes, I know the chronology is not right, but it fits in here. In yesternight's precap, it was understandable for Jodha to scream when her sheet is suddenly pulled off, but what she accused Jalal of thereafter was plain ridiculous.She seems to think he is acting fresh with her - and he is her lawfully wedded husband! - but it never occurs to her that if he was so inclined, he could have forced himself on her any day and every day, but he said he would not, and he had never since made the slightest overture to her.
One wonders, by the way, if Jalal understands what ashobaniya aacharan means😉. What do you think?
Matters of the heart: Now we come to the piece de resistance, the incredibly moving scene between Jalal and Mahaam, which was really between Jalal and an invisible Jodha. Jalal's thoughts flowed on and on, unaffected by anything that Mahaam had to interject and to object. His eyes, still and introspective, with a clear, unveiled sadness in their depths, reflected every shifting nuance of feeling as he talked.
What he said was apparently to his Badiammi, but really to himself, as he dissected, with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel and the honesty that is one of Jalal's main traits, what he felt about Jodha and about himself, and how distinct the similarity was between their respective fates and their present/ past situations.
I would like here to make a point re: Jalal reminiscing about Jodha as he is winding that long strand of her hair on his finger. Let us go back to the episode of Jodha's payal, during Jalal's secret incursion into the heart to Amer to catch a glimpse of the registan ka gulab. I had then written:
Jalal is not used to bending at all, for anything or anyone. It would normally never occur to him to stoop and pick up a girl's payal as a token. Women have always been his to take as he chose, he would never dream of chasing any of them. Still he picks it up, which means a lot more than with an ordinary man.
He does not kiss the payal as any ordinary lover would. It would be not be like the Shahenshah at all. He tosses it up in the air, but he always catches it, and when it falls into the fire, he burns his hand to retrieve it. This is not so much, as some have thought, a sign of passion for Jodha. He is not yet aware that he is falling in love with her, he does not know what love means. It is rather the possessiveness towards her that, as the line has it, uske parvaan chad gaya tha. For him, the payal symbolizes Jodha, and he will not let go of it or her, even if he has to burn his fingers to secure it.
Much has happened since then, much has changed between Jalal and Jodha, and within Jalal's persona as well. But some things are still the same. True, he now sees her as a person, not as an object to be acquired, but his possessiveness towards her is unchanged.
Also unchanged, and here I foresee agitated protests from the accredited romantics in the forum , is the fact that he is still not, in the accepted sense of the term, in love with her. The deewangee that will, one day, lead him to count his whole world well lost for her, is still in the future.
So, I would rather interpret the whole scene - beginning with the strand of hair that he instinctively hides from Mahaam's sharp, inquisitive gaze, as being too personal for outside scrutiny, but which is not the conventional love token - as a revelation not of a romantic longing for Jodha, but of something rarer and more precious. A revelation of a sense of kinship with her, rooted in the perception that they share something crucial, the arid loneliness of the soul that comes from not belonging anywhere or to anyone.
The mellifluous Urdu brings this out with a delicacy and a level of sensitivity that the English translation can barely convey.
Sab kuch hote hue bhi kuch na hona, rishtey sirf naam ke bankar reh jana, har or ruswayi, har or akelapan. Aisi haalat mein kisi par kya beethti hai yeh hum se behatar koyi nahin samajh sakta.
Aaj pehli baar humein ehsaas hua hai ki hum aur Jodha Begum, donon ek hi kashti mein sawaar hain.
Humare haalaat Jodha Begum se juda kahaan? Humein bhi apni Ammijaan ka saath nahin mila, Jodha Begum ki tarah. Saare rishtey naate hone ke bawajood, hum tanha hain, Jodha Begum ki tarah. ... Jodha Begum aaj na Amer ki hain, na Agra ki. Jaise hum bhi ek waqt na Dilli ke the, ne Agra ke, na Kabul ke.
Note the tense in the Saare rishtey naate hone ke bawajood, hum tanha hain. He is now no longer referring, as he was earlier in the passage, to his terrible childhood, to the constant threats to his life, the constant fears, the chronic instability, the longing for his parents.
The tanhayee , the loneliness inside him that he is referring to, is of now. It is in the present.
No wonder that when he leaves - after reiterating what Jodha is to him and to the Mughal sultanate, what is owed to Jodha as his accredited Begum for life, and finally his desire that she will never again wish to turn her back on the Agra palace - saying he wants to be alone for a while, Mahaam feels a cold fear creeping into her heart and mind. For though she is herself heartless, she understands the matters of the heart like none other, not even Jalal himself, not to speak of Jodha. She can see what lies ahead, for Jalal and Jodha, and for herself as well. And she is terrified by what she sees.
To revert, what the above tells us of Jalal as he is now is as incredibly moving as it is almost unbelievable. He has a degree of sensitivity, of the ability to see things from the other's point of view, to get into another's skin, so to speak, plus a degree of honesty, of candour, in disclosing his secret sorrows, that is unbelievable in such an accredited alpha male, and that too one who is an emperor to the purple born. He can not merely understand Jodha with his mind, he can feel what she is now feeling, with his heart.
Ah, yes, Rajat as this Jalal. What can one say of him, except that one could, after the first few seconds, no longer make out where Rajat ended and Jalal began, or vice versa? There can be no greater tribute to Rajat's skills than that he made us forget him and see only the Jalal that he unveiled for us.
To revert, it is this deep feeling of kinship, and the solidarity that comes from such kinship - which she too will come to recognize and share some day soon - that will set their love apart, on a plane high above that of a standard issue romance.
Jodha is not there, at this level of sensitivity, as yet. I would have expected her to remember what he had learnt of his terrible childhood and extrapolate from that to some measure of understanding, and even a degree of empathy, for his present temperament. But there seems to be no immediate likelihood of that happening.
For the present, therefore, given the armour plating that walls Jodha's heart all around where Jalal is concerned, and his reactive determination not to expose anything of his inner self to her, we are stuck with repeats, in varied formats, of the acid exchanges between them, largely, these days, on her side, that we have grown to expect. Let us see if Mohan does the trick, for Mohini seems unlikely to be the ice-breaker!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
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