Friends, today's episode can be cleanly broken into two sections. In the first half of the episode there was the "saazish" - marked by a gory murder, some vital clues unearthed, and the duo of Jalal and Salima getting hot on the scent of the culprit. In the second half of the episode was a very, very interesting kind of scene between Jodha and Jalal, when they were mostly shown walking together through various corridors as they went from Jodha's rooms to the venue of the jashn for the baby. There was something beautifully symbolic in that scene, as if they were walking through Jodha's "corridors of doubt". Step by step Jodha seemed to articulate her "frustrations" with Jalal (while he was preoccupied with the thought of the baby that never was!). But most remarkably in the end, Jalal came out of his reverie in response to Jodha's most frustrating doubt and I think he managed to nail exactly what ails Jodha in their relationship ... and now he has left it open for her to accept the idea too! Read on, you'll see what I mean ...
Many of us crib about the way Jodha behaves towards Jalal every now and then, but this is exactly the kind of thing Jalal does that unnecessarily gets Jodha's goat! How can we expect that at the end of the whole jasoosi exercise, if Jalal just pops the truth at Jodha, she will take it all lying down and then proceed with life as usual? Would she not be within her rights to then say: "You lied to me about the pregnancy and how it happened, and then you lied again even after you knew I was not pregnant? Why do you treat me as if I should take whatever you throw at me and never have feelings of my own that hurt me each time you lie? And how do you then expect me to always go back to normal at the drop of a hat after you give me twists and turns of upheaval?"
If I were Jodha I'd be fuming. It's bad enough being lied to - and worse to be kept in the lie even after the need for the lie is over. No matter how laudable Jalal's intention is to catch the culprit to save Jodha's honour, if he keeps Jodha in the dark like this till the case is solved, he doesn't do justice to her feelings of heartfelt turbulence at all. To involve somebody in a situation, without giving them clarity on their position in the situation, is tantamount to "using" them in some way without their consent. The Creatives, I thought, should not show Jalal as "using" Jodha in this way even if that is from his "good intentions". This is my very strong feeling as I write this post!
The progression of the saazish: events, clues and jasoosi
The episode opened very dramatically. Even as the soldiers of the culprit were scouring the Hakim's room with swords unsheathed, looking to murder her for having spotted and recognised the hooded lady, the Hakim herself found a slight gap of time to do a very heroic and loyal thing for Jalal. She quickly scribbled him a note that said a great deal, given the short time she had to live. She then sequestered the note in the mud surrounding a potted plant, before succumbing to the lethal swords of the soldiers.
Salima, who came there to hand over Jalal's pearls of gratitude to the Hakim saw the woman dead on the floor, very savagely killed. She could barely grasp what had happened before she ran to Jalal. Jalal was just then talking to Atga Khan about this whole saazish, saying it was good that Jodha had come clean out of this "fake pregnancy" and the culprit needed to be caught - when Salima barged in with the bad news about the Hakim, and took Jalal and Atga Khan with her to the Hakim's room.
There by a stroke of fate, Jalal noticed some mud in the fingernails of the dead Hakim's hand that led him to look for clues among the potted plants. And soon his hand touched the note that he extracted from the mud. Being illiterate himself, Jalal got Salima to read out the note to him. The Hakim had done something fabulous on that note. She had given six vital clues:
1. She said that the culprit was a burqa clad lady, who seemed to know exactly what medicines she needed to make the concotion that would create pregnancy-like symptoms in Jodha.
2.She said she was sure the burqa clad lady was not an outsider but an insider belonging to the palace.
3. She said the lady's aim seemed to be the splitting up of Jodha and Jalal by creating mutual antagonism and doubts of fidelity between them with this fake pregnancy.
4. She said the lady wore a green kada on her hand.
5. She said the lady also had a pir ka dhaga on her hand.
6. She said the lady wore payals that tinkled with sound.
An interesting question we can ask here is how the Hakim knew the motive for the saazish i.e. how did she deduce that the lady's objective was to split up Jodha and Jalal? We have no answers to this question except that for some reason the Hakim had that intuition and wrote it down.
Another point we don't have an explanation for is Salima suddenly telling Jalal, after reading the Hakim's letter, that this burqa clad lady sounded like the same payal-wearing lady she had found suspicious in the kitchen the other day. Salima had only discussed this with the Hakim. Since there was no intervening scene yesterday or today showing Salima telling Jalal about the kitchen incident, it seemed strange that Jalal knew what she was talking about when she mentioned the "kitchen lady". Maybe we have to infer that Salima and Jalal had had some in-between conversations not shown to us!
Wrapping up the scene, Jalal praised the Hakim for such outstanding "wafaadaari" - and he then reiterated the Hakim's theory that the likely motive for this whole saazish was that the culprits were trying to either make Jalal execute Jodha for infidelity or make Jodha leave Agra out of disgust for Jalal. He swore revenge.
Atga Khan suggested that the jashn planned for the new baby's arrival need not be gone through at a time like this, but Jalal insisted that in fact it should go on - so that everything looks normal, and the culprit may be caught in action at the very jashn itself!
In another dark room in the palace, a shadowy figure (of the build and structure of Sharif?) hears from the two soldiers that they have completed the assassination of the Hakim. The shadowy man then says to them: "OK, it now remmains for the lady to do her job this evening and the matter will be over successfully!"
All this suggests that if this is Sharif, and that shadowy lady is Bakshi Bano, then husband and wife are in collusion on this conspiracy - and they have even gone ot the extent of murder. I cannot believe any more that "poor Bakshi" was just being used by Sharif. The way she manhandled the Hakim, and participated in a systematic dosing of Jodha, and is now being counted on to do some more vile things at the jashn with accurate timing ... how can she be just an innocent pawn, under a cruel husband's duress? She looks like an active co-conspirator!
Jalal-Jodha: the long walk down Jodha's "corridors of doubt"
Okay, let's leave aside the saazish and now focus on the Jodha -Jalal scene. As I mentioned earlier, it was a tremendously well-planned scene, cinematically speaking. The concept of the long corridors through which they walked was a perfect symbolism for them mentally walking through all Jodha's "corridors of doubt" that had arisen between them as a result of this fake pregnancy. The Creatives could have easily shot the whole sequence in a single room and it would have been a good scene with good dialogues. But by making the couple walk through the many corridors, turning corners every now and then, and at each stage of the walk talking about different angles of the same subject was a brilliant piece of direction! It was also very symbolic that even as they talked they walked in step with each other as if they were trying to get in alignment with each other.
The scene started in Jodha's room where she was listlessly dressing up for the jashn that she was not inclined to attend. Her deepest sorrow was that Jalal had fathered her child out of force on her and it was not a child of love. He had now admitted as much in front of his mother, annd even if his intentions were to save her honour from inferences of infidelity, he had done her no favours by having "good intentions" in front of his mother, while he had broken his promises on that stormy night. Most troubling for Jodha was the flashbacks she was seeing where he was telling Hamida that it was but natural he should have doubts if Jodha had any affairs in Amer before him! And later he had also said he owed her no explanations or apologies either for saying what he did to Hamida.
Jalal on entering the room to fetch Jodha saw her wearing the ring and commented on it, but Jodha naturally upset, said it was all for Hamida's sake. Jalal is then seen self-talking that unfortunately he is not in a position to let Jodha know that she is not pregnant till he is able to solve the conspiracy and nail the culprit ... and then they step out of the room together, turning into the corridors towards the jashn venue.
In the first corridor Jodha brings up the precap scene of the last episode. She says: "After I have had this baby, I want to leave Agra for good, even if you want to kill me". He on the other hand goes off tangentially. He says "If the baby is a boy we'll call him Salim (after Sheikh Salim Chisti) or if it's a girl we'll call her Khanum Sultana". Jodha is perplexed but she also looks too distressed to argue.
They walk on till they reach another passageway. There she says to him: "How can you look so happy to be a father when you have forced yourself on me to prooduce this baby?" And he doen't answer that directly, but thinks to himself again tangentially: "Those are the baby names I wanted for my child when Ruq was pregnant. But here I am again with no baby to name!".
They are then seen in another stretch of the corridor, where Jodha has by now reached a point of deeper frustration. She launches into an attack on him saying again: "Are you totally without feelings? You broke your promises to me that night, all just for the relentless need for an heir? How that heir was conceived makes no difference to you? Did you not even care if the child was conceived by force?' (or words to that effect). Now comes the most interesting answer he gives her: "You forget, my dear, that on that stromy night, you were yourself so full of passion that I was unable to resist your demands!" She is unable to swallow this and says "Lies, lies, lies", but he has an enigmatic smile on his face.
Maybe he was just enjoying pulling her leg, but this statement of his has a deeper connotation too! In a way, he was seeding the idea in her that a woman too has sexual urges and a man needn't always be the perpetrator of a night that results in a child!
As he said this to her, the way she immediately shouted "Lies, lies, lies" seemed to me like she was in denial about herself. It looked like it was not Jalal's urges she was afraid of. He had hit the nail on the head. She was afraid of her own urges surfacing and that could be her big reason for avoiding physical relations with him! If Jalal had done this for giving Jodha a sharp "self-reality-check", then I must say he is extremely astute and bang on in his reading of her!
Sundry characters and their goings-on in today's episode
Aside from the main two halves of this episode we also saw two smaller scenes of the less important characters:
1. Adham and Maham were congratulating themselves on Kabul Munim's elevation as Wazir - e- Aliyah and were saying it was a good thing to keep Atga Khan away from the post. Maham, still believing that Jalal was not the father of the baby and it was an illegitimate child, kept crowing over the future date when embarassment would flood the royal family!
2. Ruq surprised even Hoshiyaar by insisting on attending the jashn for the sake of "her Jalal". (It appears in the past she has always tried to cry sick when she had to attend jashns that were not about her!)
In closing, I hope this whole jasoosi track ends by this week. I cannot stand the idea that Jodha is being put under such stress till the culprit is nailed. It's just not on!
Anupamaa
Cricket
