episode 231 i scent a letter

love looks not with the eyes but with the mind
and therefore is wing'd cupid painted blind
~~~ william shakespeare, a midsummer night's dream ~~~

an episode that starts with shyam is bound to not make me too happy. yet, when i look at what i read in it, he does seem to be a good representative of the god of desire, erotic love, attraction and affection... cupid.

structure wise, everything seemed to be focused on getting the couple to shift to gh. khushi was back to her let me kill you with love strategy, asr snarled and looked hot and was deliciously rude. all that class talk had to happen i guess, and right in the middle of it of course amma had to call so that khushi makes the connection and takes the classy one for a look see of the not so wealthy middle class world he supposedly abhors and ridicules.

i say supposedly because the least classy of them all mami ji lives with him and gets an inordinate amount of love and respect despite her bizarre ways and tongue... a rather lovely nonjudgmental love there, because he seems to value the core of a person, the essential being, that may not even be easily apparent and missed by the less perceptive.

but with khushi, he must snarl, he must be really really mean, go straight for the jugular. oh i love that. says, she gets under his skin and how... he looks for the choicest words to get to her, make her mad, get angry, and he never ever wonders why he does that.

a girl who according to him is a home breaker, who loves another... he can't just throw her out of his life. he who hates galat and wants to be sahi and never anything else, when he sees the most galat thing ever on the terrace he can't bring himself to cut a tie his faraq has started making...

his many layers come into play. with one he hates her, even despises. with the other he can't help but love her, adore her actually. kaash main tumse nafrat kar pata.

and she, she who has every reason to absolutely hate him. look at how he has demeaned her, dragged her to a temple and set up a "contract" marriage, whatever that is, hasn't given her a single chance to place her point of view, hasn't asked her for one even... if she hated him would that be abnormal?

yet, she frets when he is hurt, stays up nights when he is unwell, asks him what he meant by main hamesha hamesha tumse..., gets mad at him when he doesn't answer... and never ever asks herself why it's important to know that or why she does what she does.

the laws of desire, attraction, erotic love, affection are not so easy to understand, for this one needs at the very least a god.

and so comes shyam with orange juice. making us think instantly of a lopsided smile growing and a girl in tears saying "woh santre ka juice nahin mila na, iss liye." if you ask me, that day, cupid's arrow had found its mark so sharp and right, someone never quite recovered...

the drums beat, speaking of foul play, felony. khushi is approaching... and shyam has seen the wallet, lying open on the table. a very careless tycoon is in the bathroom.

an uncomfortable scene ensues. shyam crosses the line again and again, and khushi is hardly as vocal as you'd expect her to be... at least in this she is consistent. maybe they tried to indicate the sort of pressure relationships bring to bear on a situation. he is anjali's husband, asr's brother in law, the son in law of the family in a culture where sons in law are given a very high and special status. she being at one time just a girl who comes home to teach someone and even now, the bahu of the family, can't really treat him the way she may even wish to...

however, finally she does tell him off with a stern, "humen chhoone ki koshish bhi mat kijiye..." don't even try to touch me.

and soon after, she tells herself not to think of the man, just bury the thoughts and forget them... this as aarwen pointed out, may be a trait of khushi's. when things are particularly unpleasant, painful... she tries to look away from them. her constant jabber, her eating, both may be signs of that. and her stars may have come about as a result of that as well. the loss of her parents was too too traumatic for an eight year old, she needed something to hang onto, something to just take it all away... and maybe of this need came that beautiful vishwas. a trait can express in many ways, sometimes positively, sometimes just as a weird quirk, even rather nastily at times.

anyway, this whole drama is about a key. the key to asr's locker that shyam wants to swipe. the first time i saw, of course i had hopes it will lead to some story, now we know otherwise.

but maybe the key has another purpose? reminds me of a meeting in a darga, mannat, even mystery and unlocking... maybe they are looking for the key to each other's hearts, feelings...

the episode is dotted with things that are like little signals and signs, orange juice is such an asr khushi thing... key, from the third episode it means something.

wallet. a place where you keep precious things. what a lot of time the two are shown squabbling over it. and then a funny crazy dhadkane moment.

"what the hell, mera wallet!" now why do i like this man to sound this exasperated and short all the time.

"mera wallet tumhare paas kya kar raha hai..." he snaps what's my wallet doing with you to her very wife like helpfulness with it. and it was interesting the way she ran to make sure his wallet was dry, his money fine, now that was not just to show him... so shyam the cupid did his job quite well.

asr is particular, finicky... lovely. and maybe true to type.

"meri cheezon ko haath mat lagaya karo!" don't touch my things... divine love talk is on. you interfere with my frequency, my signal, you unnerve me with your very presence, if you "haath lagao" me or mine, i might melt, so please... hands off! i got to stay mad at you. i hate you, after all.

"aap chahe toh paise gin sakte hain..." you can count the money if you like, she says, the way he goes on about anyone touching his wallet, i don't blame her. but he's taken aback. he did not mean that... no not at all... he meant the other thing he he.

she is as sweet as she'd promised to be, he acerbic, irritable, gorgeous.

he looks at her in that slightly lost, genuinely surprised then moving to contrite way... "no no i didn't mean that..." so natural and sweet, how does this girl remain sane after that. she doesn't, thank g.

"main kuch aur dekh raha tha..." i was checking something else, as he says that she looks at him bemused, getting just a little bit lost... but then quickly she comes back to her scheming khushi self.

i love these little escapes into that feeling they can't contain, can't control.

she insists on helping him with his jacket. with an angry look he decides to give in, she prattles on, distracting him... and a hot smart one from asr:

"tumhari kya schedule hai aur tumhari governor se meeting kab hai usme mujhe koi interest nahin hai.!" what your schedule is and when you are to meet the governor is of no interest to me. he tries to put her in her place, but she is irrepressible...

"suniye toh... humare governor toh aap hai..." listen, you are my governor... with a cheesy look. oh irritattting. he needs to go now.

but she does another natak and lies down in his path. excessive khushiness, more than ott is being reached. yet it reminds me of a story of love from childhood. kali was mad at the world and running around killing all, decimating the earth, everyone ran to shiv and said, do something, get your wife to calm down. shiv lay down on road, knowing she'd be passing that way. kali came raging down the path and stepped on his chest by mistake, she did not see him. but the moment she realised, she stopped, her tongue out in a sign of oops what have i done. yeah, she was touching her patidev's chest with her foot. sacrilege. and in that pause, her gussa came down. when we bongs do kali puja, that pose is what the idol depicts. to me it has also always meant extreme love... both his and hers. kali is the emblem of shakti, power, she is also the goddess of time and change... shiv is her eternal consort, the destroyer and transformer of our worlds in the trimurti... together they are a couple suggesting many things at many levels. a sense of dynamism, of timelessness, of essential bonds, and truth.

with that one completely crazy move of khushi's, and even as i was thinking, what the... what have they written and what is she doing, i thought of all that... slight goosebumps.

a hanky is lovingly proffered, angrily taken.

a handkerchief with a lipstick mark and a scent.

very tacky, very silly... and i really can't blame asr for flying into a rage. whenever the guy has a meeting his biwi does something strange, this is a very kkg thing, the amount of times she has barged into his meetings...

this time, such an intimate innuendo. the lipstick is obvious, but the hanky and the ittr make me smile and again wander into the labyrinth of love...

handkerchief always brings to mind othello. some say, that killing a beloved wife because you believed such a flimsy so called proof is ridiculous, and maybe it is... maybe even shakespeare knew that hanky was a thin excuse but it is today a part of a potent tale of love and my subconscious automatically takes note.

seems in portugal girls sew handkerchiefs of love for men they like, i know in the old days in bengal, girls would sew the husband's initials onto these patches of fabric, a very wife thing to do... seen in many movies, i am almost sure what charulata sews here is a hanky for her hubs.


picture: credit uploader

and ittr... scent. oh what could be more signal giving between a man and woman. musk dear flitting through my head and all the other thoughts of what perfume does to turn on the lovin'.

sweetly enough, though she has done this to get after him, she is very offended at his calling her trick and perfume "cheap". what, cheap? nooo, she has chosen one of the best ittr from chandni chowk... telltale i thought. you want to somewhere always get the best for him, even if it's to make him go nuts.

as i look at all the cues of love or should i say lovin' scattered through the episode... orange juice, key, wife on floor crossing pati parameshwar's path, hanky, ittr... it's like some sign language is going on between the writers and the viewers' subconscious mind. at the rational plane, nothing really makes much sense, only that moves toward gh are afoot, but at a stage when it is not possible to show the two in deep romance, subliminal messages of love keep coming. we are kept focused and tuned, while creatives grapple with trp issues and what's to be shown after marriage, and how to handle barun's leave, and other such mundane matters. 

in the middle of that the revelation that babli is an orphan. a couple of scenes with the kid i could bear to watch. they were perhaps trying to build a story with her, but nothing came of it. never quite understood ipk's thing for orphans... jung and freud should watch the show, lots of collective unconscious and archetypes there i think and of course dreams that are analyzed but never enough.

todally beyond all analysis. me serious.

how can a guy, in the middle of a most not spectacular scene look like that and say something so gorgeously. angry, irritated, incredulous, hot, very hot, dangerously hot, barun really got asr well.

......................

episodes of swami and 
taekwondo queen
episode rambles
fanfiction