LAST PART CORRECTED
Folks,
These are very murky waters indeed, deep and cold and murderous. It is not just Yudh and his loved ones who have to swim thru them and survive, but us, the viewers, as well. Right now, the going looks tough. For one thing, on Thursday. the script seemed to be positively littered with corpses, like a novel by James Hadley Chase or Peter Cheney.
There were so many strands in this episode, all served up in bits and pieces thanks to the editor. Some overtly linked to each other and clearly courtesy MM. Some apparently stand alone, but not really so, like the killing of Kapil. It was a labyrinth of clues and happenings, and it took a good bit of both attention and effort to sort them out, at least in part!
Then there was the shocking bit in the precap, which knocked me for a six, of Anand and Yudh falling out completely. Now this was something I had always hoped would never happen, for even in a dark tale, there have to be some relationships that stand the test of time. And Anand was always like Hanuman to Yudh's Ram. How then can Lord Ram discard Hanuman? ðŸ˜
Finally, the long awaited appearance of Nawazuddin Siddiqui, again in the precap, hollering to a distraught Yudh that he wanted the money now, and all of it. What that was about remains to be seen, but it seemed likely to be linked to the latest mystery, the one concerning the orphanage land.
MM: The spider in its web: So, I shall simply list all the strands, in no particular order, and try to identify the links that lead back from them to the one person who is directing this whole khel, while all the time remaining in the shadows, MM.
He is like a fat, evil spider sitting at the centre of its web, in a dark corner, manipulating the multitude of sticky threads radiating out in all directions. Closing in, slowly but surely, on the big prey, Yudh, while seizing and immobilising smaller prey, like Rishi and Anand and Mona, in the process, for as each of them is got out of the way, the big one becomes progressively more vulnerable.
He is going to surface soon, at least for Malik and Nikhil, who are eagerly awaiting the coming of their khufiya dost whose latest gift to them was the idea of disabling the server that was conveying the live feeds from Vellore and Hyderabad to Taruni in the OT. That it failed, as did all the other earlier attempts, is attributed by the duo to Yudh's luck, and they are now looking forward to MM finally producing a plan that cannot fail.
-Rishi: The knockout blow: The telecast of the trek of Rishi and Dilip to the AILF camp, and the supporting statement by Dilip, made under blunt police coercion, succeed in marketing to the whole country the story that Rishi, the CEO of Shanti Mining Company, had sought to take revenge for the airport shootout by taking the law into his own hands and having a number of the AILF cadres killed by his mercenaries. There seemed to be no way of refuting this report, for all the evidence, and visual evidence, was against Rishi. It was to get Rishi on board, and set him up as the fall guy for this exercise, that the Home Minister had paid Ranjan 15 lakhs (the bag that Ranjan asks his wife to receive and safeguard).
Yudh, who is a caring and supportive father, earlier gives Rishi - who confesses that all he had wanted was to prove himself to his father, no matter what that took - a second chance. Noting that he should not have left the responsibilties of such a large business empire to Rishi alone, he assures his incredulous son that when he realised that he had made a mistake, the battle was already half won. As Rishi promises that he will make no more mistakes, the look of affectionate indulgence on Yudh's face was a treat to behold.
The telecast, however, is the last straw, and Yudh is livid. As he reminds Anand, he had earlier broken ranks even with his mentor Gautam Dev, and set out to do business on his own only because he did not want his firm, or himself, to be associated with any wrongdoing.
But now, because of this single piece of abysmal folly on Rishi's part, the reputation of Shanti Constructions, built up with great effort over so many years, lies in tatters. Yudh cannot undertake the kind of briefings and press interactions needed to salvage at least something from the wreckage, for he has to be with Nayantara. So the disaster seems, for now, to be complete.
It is noteworthy that Yudh, even at the height of his fury, does not raise his hand against Rishi. But his words are like whiplashes. As the unfortunate Rishi, ordered to close down the mines and get back in a month, weeps in despair in the washroom, ending by smashing the mirror with his fist - very much like the Amitabh Bachchan of the 1970s - one's heart goes out to the poor boy.
I am sure that as shown in the precap, he will pick himself up, try to fight fire with fire and attempt to trip up the Home Minister. And at the same time, wipe off the blackmarks on the reputation of Shanti Constructions. I very much hope that, like his sister in the OT, Rishi too pulls it off.
Now, the question is this. Is this fiasco, and its fallout for Yudh, solely a saazish of the Home Minister, or is there someone else who is using the Minister, ie MM? No prizes for guessing this one!
-Death comes to the fake HK staffer: This was the one who sprayed VX all over Yudh's room, and placed Yudh's medical file, the one that was taken from the crashed car of Dr. Mehra, on Yudh's desk. He had disappeared, as had the Shanti Constructions driver Kundan who had been in cahoots with him.
Now Kundan, finally located and surrounded by 3 of Dabra's hefty men, still manages to escape and make it to Inspector Choudhuri at his police station. It was not clear how the inspector, who is shown taking Kundan with him to search for his assailants, next lands up in a Shanti Constructions site and discovers the dead body of the missing VX guy.
Obviously MM had decided that this henchman of his would be more useful to him dead than alive!
What next? Why, it turns out that the blood on the shirt found in the boot of Anand's car, plus the broken tooth, which had then led to Anand being freed from police custody as neither belonged to the missing Agent Singh, were now proved to belong to the dead VX guy.
The trap having now closed with a snap, Anand, still grappling with the fallout of the Rishi telecast, is now in another kind of very hot water. But he is nothing if not stoic, and so he comes back home, partly to satisfy his wife Preeti who has no confidence in the nurse appointed to mind their son Aditya, and partly to face the music with Inspector Choudhuri.
In a very funny aside, Inspector Choudhuri, who has the warrant for Anand's arrest in his pocket , uses it (inadvertently or deliberately? I would like to think it was the latter, but it is most likely the former) to hold the pakodas that he snacks on at a roadside stall. By the time he has finished, it will be unusable!😉
Meanwhile Anand has got out of the airport without being arrested, for lack of the warrant, and he is able to catch up with Mona and get the lowdown on the Jeet enquiry against Gautam Dev, which bids fair to suck in Yudh as well.
- A truly honourable man: This is Jeet. Not only does he conduct the vigilance enquiry against Gautam Dev with scrupulous fairness, but he goes out of his way to ensure - by explaining to Taruni why she has to detach herself professionally from Yudh - that the case stays with him, and is not shifted to another, less scrupulous officer who could then be used by Yudh's unnamed enemy to crucify him.
Taruni does follow her stepfather's advice, and tells Yudh that she can no longer cope with his world, and is returning to her world of her patients and the hospital. Yudh's face as he watches her departing figure is like a mask of stoicism and suppressed grief, the grief at the loss of a stout-hearted and capable aide , who had stood by him in very bad times and helped pull him thru. His daughter is still his, but for how long?
To revert, in this episode, Jeet meets Mona to try and find out why, though she has never worked for him, there are files relating to Gautam Dev on her laptop.He warns her that a continuing business connection between Gautam and Yudh can be taken as proved since she, Yudh's media manager, had also helped Gautam clean up his businesses before selling them. Moreover, Yudh had also, to help his mentor, bought some of Gautam's ailing companies at premium prices under other names, which would also heighten suspicions about him and Gautam. Mona is not able to help him with explanations, but because Jeet meets with her, she is able to brief Anand about the danger to Yudh that lies ahead.
Next, Jeet goes to meet Gautam Dev, who is now in even frailer health. He seems resigned to being jailed after this enquiry, but is worried that he might drag Yudh down with him. When he asks Jeet who is the person persecuting him in this tenacious fashion, he is told that this will take some more days to be revealed. Then Jeet, in another generous gesture, tells Gautam that till he learns this person's identity, he will not submit the file of his enquiry against Yudh to the authorities. That would be his trump card.
The mysterious orphanage: This is the newest puzzle for us. Jeet asks Gautam about the one file in Mona's laptop, about an orphanage property, that had no connection at all with Gautam's or Yudh's business affairs. Gautam tells him that he had always taken great care that the matter of the orphanage property should not come up anywhere. He thus could not understand how it had made its way to Mona's laptop.
You and I could enlighten this duo, could we not? MM must have had than file inserted into the laptop before having it handed over to Jeet. But why?
In the precap, Gautam is shown reminding Yudh of this orphanage property. The mystery remains as it was.
The best, but not for long: I was delighted when Creep No. 1 was beaten to death at long last.
The actual coup de grace is given by a man whose face I could not recognise, but he was obviously acting on orders from MM. He climbs into the bedroom where Kapil is lying , probably unconscious after the thrashing that he had received from Manju, his wife, after she finds him struggling, in Mona's bedroom, with a hysterical Smriti. The man thus finishes off the job begun by Manju. Hallelujah!
Manju of course did not know that the girl had been kidnapped by MM's henchman, , the fake inspector who nearly killed Anand, trussed up, and left there for Kapil to find. And that when he saw her there, a scared Kapil was actually trying to free her and send her out of the flat. But the girl, seeing him looming over her, naturally gets hysterical, struggles and screams. Enter Manju, and after she leaves the room dragging the semi-conscious Smriti with her, the rest follows.
In the end, Manju naturally ends up believing that it was she who had bumped Kapil off.
But I wonder how Manju found that stout stick, that looks like a baseball bat, so ready at hand. Probably it was something Mona had gifted her nephews. And a kidnapping in broad daylight, when Smriti is shown sitting with friends and talking on her mobile? Maybe she was told that someone she knew wanted her to come to him.
Anyhow, this wonderful scenario was then promptly spoilt by Mona turning herself in to the police and confessing to the killing, in order to spare her sister, who thinks that she is the killer, and her beloved nephews. Very, very filmy, I am afraid.At episode end, Anand, who refuses to believe that Mona is guilty, is told the truth by Mona's friend Kavita, the one who is the right hand woman of Mukesh Chhabra of Daily News. He requests her to do something to save or help Mona. I am sure she will.
So, folks, that is it, and I am glad that I have got this to you 5 hours before Yudh 17 airs. I promise to be regular for the rest of the week😉. Bye for now!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Vanshaj
Love Friendship Dating and Relationships
