Folks,
I can practically hear you whispering to yourself What is it with these mice? She has finally lost it! Relax, maajhi nahin satakliđ. Not yet, at least. This title is borrowed from that of a famous book by the even more famous American author John Steinbeck, which is turn was inspired by a line from a Scottish poem: The well laid plans of mice and men, gang oft agley. Translation: Often go wrong. Which seems to have happened last night (though I managed to watch my recording only at 2:30 pm today, thanks to guests staying with us) to a good many of our characters. Whence this title.
Now whose plans shall we start with? First, of course, our MM, aka, or so I hope, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who had better turn up soon, or the series will be over before we get a look at him.đ I hope this is not going to be like The Invisible Man, where one got to see the leading man, Claude Rains, only in the last shot, as he became visible in death. There is already very little of Sarika, and K.K.Menon seems to have done a disappearing act, so we cannot afford to have Nawazuddin for a blink and you miss him appearance now, can we?
Anand: the noose comes off: This is the first of MM's plans that fails totally. Not only is Inspector Choudhuri honest and conscientious, he is also intelligent. So he finds out that bar the missing corpse of Agent Singh, everything else on the site of the "encounter killing" tallies with Anand's statement. He must also have got statements from those who saw Anand and Singh being led off in handcuffs. The clinching bit: he gets the DNA report for the blood on the clothes found in the boot of Anand's car, and for the tooth, and neither is Singh's. Of course, he could still have detained Anand on grounds of suspicion, for having bloodstained garments in his car, but here again, he reasons, correctly, that Anand is not a fool to have carried around all this incriminating stuff all day in his car.
So Anand walks free. His face is mostly inscrutable, but his body language throughout the scene with the inspector is superb. The incredulous, wide-eyed look when he is told that he can go. The turning away to leave, and then the turning around, fingers raised and then lowered, as if to click on a point that has just occurred to him. Aapne humein kyon chhoda?
Earlier, the scene in the police lock up between Anand and Yudh says a lot about their relationship, and even more about Anand himself. Even in such a deep hole, with all the evidence stacked against him, he is able, just as he had earlier laughed heartily at his predicament with Inspector Choudhuri, to retain his cool, more so than even Yudh.
Dismissing the knee jerk idea of Yudh pulling strings and thus putting pressure on the police, which would have got him nowhere but to the court, Anand zeroes in on the key point, that there is an insider in Yudh's office who is a mole for the enemy, who keeps an eye on all of them. The only likely way to get to him would be to restart their search for the fake housekeeping staffer who sprayed the VX in Yudh's room and placed Yudh's medical report, stolen from Dr. Mehra's crashed car, in his room.
Yudh chases this up, but the treacherous Shanti Constructions driver, Kundan, who was in cahoots with the poisoner, is still missing. It is to be seen what happens here.
The one substantive outcome so far seems to be that faced with this situation, Yudh reluctantly abandons his earlier asserted maxim: Yahan par kaam karnewale sab mera parivaar hain, aur main apne parivaar par nazar nahin rakta... and agrees to have CCTV cameras installed inside the office as well.
Lastly, the tragic predicament of Anand's wife Preeti, always afraid that their autistic son will soon be too much even for the new nurse to handle, appears once again. The bit when Preeti, her throat working and her voice nearly suspended, struggles to convery her worries to an exhausted Anand, was remarkable in its understated pathos.
Jeet-Taruni-Yudh: the new triangle: This is another of MM's plans that threatens to gang agley. As Jeet tells Taruni, what is under way is a full scale witch hunt by a very powerful man, as yet in the shadows, who is out to get Yudh good and proper. He does this, in the official mode, , by pressurising the vigilance department into conducting a vigilance enquiry against Gautam Dev, who is merely a stalking horse, and thru his long association with Yudh, against Yudh himself. Rather like President Richard Nixon's ill famed use of the US Internal Revenue Service against his political opponents and his enemies in general.
Now MM's bad luck is that it is Jeet, a thoroughly honest and conscientious officer, who had been put in charge of this enquiry. Jeet does not want to let Yudh be railroaded into jail thru a trumped up enquiry, and his convictiont that this is what is being attempted has been strengthened when Mona's laptop and mobile land unexpectedly on his desk. As he tells Taruni, he has tried for a whole day to reject a piece of evidence - clearly the laptop - but he could not. Evidence, he adds, is being" served up" to him and his team, and it is clearly a targeting of Yudh.
NB: Jeet thinks, naturally but mistakenly, that the laptop-mobile combo is courtesy MM, but of course it is courtesy two others of Yudh's innumerable enemies, Dharmendra Malik and Nikhil Pardesi. Not that this affects Jeet's main argument.
Against this background, Jeet's pitch for Taruni to sever all her professional ties with Yudh and his business is far more lucid, plausible, and acceptable, and thus far more likely to succeed, than Gauri's blunt fiat of the day before, which Taruni, predictably, brushed aside just as she does Arjun's constant cribbing. For he makes it clear to her that she has to do this for Yudh's sake.
She has to do it to prevent Jeet from being disqualified, on the grounds of conflict of interest, from conducting the enquiry, which would then be handed over to a pliable officer, who would proceed to crucify Yudh in short order. If I am to be able to give Yudh a fair deal, Jeet's clincher of an argument goes, you have detach yourself from all of Yudh's business dealings.
Taruni's face looks at once angry, resentful and helpless. It remains to be seen what she does now. But the very fact that Jeet is determined not to let Yudh be fixed by his unknown enemy is a loss of ground for MM.
Rishi: a Wild West shootfest: As I wrote yesterday, Rishi is shooting up, not heightwise, but in professional acumen, in man management skills, and last but not the least, in his appetite for risk. This last leads him to practically court trouble, as when he dismisses his bodyguard and goes alone to the airport in an autorickshaw. If Dabra had not sent his man to the airport at once, things could have gone much worse all round.
A bloomer: Before I go any further in this segment, a mea culpa is in order. I have always felt that any episode analysis of Yudh should be done only after at least 2 viewings; the only earlier occasion when I flouted my own rule was for Episode 1, and I ended up with 2 bloomers that had to be corrected post facto. It was the same for the Monday Episode 13, and I owe Shreya (KhotaSikaShreya) a big Thank You for alerting me to a very significant point in the interaction between Rishi and the two mine workers who had planted the dynamite in the mine. A point which I had missed, thus ending up with a wrong interpretation of the future role of these two, and also a serious underestimation of Rishi's savvy.
Once I had watched that bit a second time, I noted Rishi's pausing after Naukri chahiye?, to rub his chin, only to add, Tab to mere liye kuch karna hoga..As their heads nod in eager assent, he then says, unexpectedly, Chai piyoge?, before the scene shifts.
It was clear that Sonny Boy was far more astute than I had given him credit for, He had planted these 2 chaps, after all their preparatory rona dhona to their handler for the mine sabotage and to Gopal Arun as well, as his moles in Gopal's outfit and , by extension, in the fringes of the AILF as well. This was confirmed today, with a shot showing them both approaching Rishi confidentially.
Rishi wants to take Gopal and the AILF head on, something of which his father would never approve. I loved that bit when Yudh asks his son what he was doing with a gun - why, obviously playing a real life videogame at the airport with Ranjan's partners! - and Rishi hangs his head and says nothing.
Shreya had, if I remember right, praised Rishi for being different and more gutsy in his readiness to defend himself instead of, as Yudh would have done, depending on Dabra and his men. True, he is gutsy, but that alone is not enough. If Dabra's man had not turned up at the airport, that gang would have snatched Rishi , who was ambling along outside the airport, in an instant.
To revert, in that delightful little scene in his bedroom with an exasperated Ms. IB, he proposes a sharing of the anti-AILF work, he taking them on from outside and she from inside. There is a kind of boyish bravado to Rishi that is very appealing, but that is not to say that all his ideas are either feasible or safe.
Ms. IB thinks that he needs to be reined in fast - bahaduri dikhakar bewaqoofi mat karo - and if possible diverted to development work among the tribals, before he ruins her work of many years on the financing of the Naxalite operations. No wonder she is yelling at him in the precap for having lied to her, as bullets fly all around them. This can only be her official comrades, the AILF, in action, for Ranjan's criminal colleagues, the would be kidnappers, have given it up as a bad job and called it quits after Nayantara gets shot in the kidnap attempt at the airport.
By episode end, with the police sticking Gopal Arun with charges on not just the mine blast but the airport shooting as well, things look decidedly gloomy for him. Rishi is too worried about his mother to rejoice about the success of his plan to get Gopal, and in any case, I am not too sure whether this plan is really going to work till the end.
To sum up, Rishi has got out of one noose, no thanks to himself and at a very high cost, but the other is still in place. The plans of Ranjan's collaborators have definitely gang agley, but as for the AILF, I would not be too sure.
Nayantara: near deadly outcome: After a bitter pronouncement about men in general, with Yudh and Ranjan in the front row, being self-indulgent, self-willed, insensitive brutes, Nayantara plans to bring Rishi back home with her. But she ends up in a substandard operating theatre with a bullet inside her, and gangrene (if it is left there) and organ failure (if the complex surgery is botched up) as the more likely outcomes than a successful extraction of the bullet.
Ranjan: a feline talent: The talent for landing on one's feet, I mean, which is the speciality of the cat species. His kidnapping plan, the product, as I had noted yesterday , of sheer desperation, might have failed, but he has marketed his wafadaari to his former pal Babloo, now the Home Minister, for the substantial sum of Rs. 15 lakhs, which he tries to get in advance. It is a much easier and safer job at that, for all that he, the scion of a princely family, has to swallow his pride, and stand while Babloo, who must now not be so addressed, is seated, and then dismisses him with a banana, as if he was a monkey.
Very, very filmy: And why not? The episode end sees Taruni all set for a very tricky operation to extract the bullet from Nayantara's body, without either adequate experience or adequate equipment, and depending on the assistance of senior surgeons only thru a satellite link. The scene of Yudh trying to ginger up a panicky, white-faced Taruni and assure her that with the long distance help available, she will be able to pull it off, was beautifully done. One could almost feel him trying to transfer his confidence and his optimism to her. But then it is she who has to do it, and naturally she is terrified, for failure would condemn her to lifelong guilt and regret.
It seemed from the precap that she had in fact pulled it off. Heroines never fail, and I am all for this cinematic commandment. Plus I was profoundly relieved that Anurag Kashyap, with his quixotic bent of mind, did not choose this track to pay homage to Amar, Akbar, Anthony, with Taruni. Rishi and Yudh all donating their blood (all O group, or universal donors, of course, though Manmohan Desai never bothered with such technicalities in the film!) to a recumbent Nayantara! đ
Folks, 14 down and just 6 to go!
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