if just to say "ghar chalte hai," a guy looks this good, then what are we to do.
episode 51
"there is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing"
~~~ kahlil gibran ~~~
he turns and looks at the door
one last time i'll look at you
rabba vey unwinds gently and eases into frame
when the most expressive pair of eyes long for someone with stirring eloquence, it's hard to think of anything else. to not feel all the things this torn young man must be feeling, unprepared as he was for emotions of this proportion.
then a question came knocking. and though i tried to lock the door and refused to let it find me, it persisted. i have felt most uncomfortable watching the scenes of asr being paralleled with shyam's in the matter of khushi. while one's emotions have felt beautiful and right, the other one's completely illicit, even obscene.
yet, both men had women in their lives. not just shyam. had asr not brought lavanya and it was just a casual fling between two people who belonged to the same world, it would be one thing, but now it wasn't that. thanks to his confrontation with his grandmother over choices and the individual's right to live the way he or she wants to, he now had brought la home. the complexion of there relationship had changed. it was as close to permanence as two people, who expressly did not believe in marriage, could take their relationship. she trusted him. she read some sort of commitment in this act of his.
and yet, his thoughts were wrapped like a stubborn dupatta around another girl, flying to her at the sight or sound of anything. why did this feel right and not what shyam was doing?
i guess it was to do with the response of the two men to the situation they found themselves in. while shyam never tried, not even once, to fight the attraction he felt, asr did everything he could not to think of her. not only because of la, because of himself, and his stated idea of there being no space for love in his life.
till the very end, he tried to deny the claim her thoughts made on him. he fought hard, very hard. he tried to be fair to la, he almost convinced himself, but finally la saw the thing for what it was.
he admitted then perhaps he'd never really been fair to la. and in their interaction was a respect for each other, a pain, that made you feel, this is the inexplicable grip of human relations that we do often find ourselves in. we may want it all to be cut and dried but matters of the heart rarely are. the essential question is how do we deal with the difficult questions.
which is where character comes in, i guess. shyam unfortunately, was made of weak and dark and ugly things. while asr of stuff more noble, more clear and strong.
even after la left, it wasn't as though asr immediately chased his feelings for khushi, he just kept trying to ignore them, till he absolutely couldn't and had to say, he would tell her that day, "faraq kyun padta hai."
shyam wouldn't understand the finer points of such a struggle, nor why you must search for the right path, for him always the easy way out. a huge difference in the way he defined living life his way and the way asr defined the same thing. as far as shyam is concerned, this constitutes getting everything he wants, no matter what happens to others. to asr, it is getting to live the way he wants to, without interfering with the way others want to live their lives.
and so it was that i got lost looking at a man completely tossed by the absence of a woman who said she was going "hamesha ke liye." how out of it all his air when di finds him, and that caught unawares look in the eyes, the slightly unrooted feel, how does an actor get the perfect nuance of a moment as hard to describe as that. no over acting, no under acting, there was a man standing immersed in another world, and his sister walked in on him.
a pause. someone should learn from this young man how to make utterly ordinary things sound fabulous. "kuch nahin... chale," oh the distracted air in the voice. "jija ji yahan kya kar rahe honge...," a grainy rasp in the voice... "di, let's go!" er, how does one not get stuck here?
so many times it looked like she would walk in on the truth regarding her husband. as at this very moment. but again the hide and seek with shyam's truth continued. what started with a suspicious frown ended on a smiling, indulgent, "aap bhi na..." shyam again made use of his extreme ease with lying and got his saale saab and raani sahiba exactly where he wanted them.
but shyam wasn't the only one with a penchant for the non-truth here. far away in a car, another liar fretted. again a question, why did khushi lie about leaving town? the answer can go so many ways, in literature class this could well end up being the favourite of examiners, if not for anything just to see how imaginative the students were capable of being.
my easy answer: she was feeling, just like him, things unfamiliar, things too powerful, and things she neither knew what to call, nor wanted. too complicated. a young girl from a sheltered middle class home, her head already filled with several set notions of what's love, marriage, duty, etc., and what a "good" man was all about, was certainly not prepared for the things she was feeling. why was she constantly thinking of the rakshas, why wasn't she happy at the thought of never seeing him? and then in that hot and bothered storeroom, everything possibly came to a head. not just her heart, her desire possibly spoke and said things that terrified her.
so she had to find a way to shut it all out. and without thinking, just wanting to hit back at the one who caused this unplanned madness, she lied. to hurt him back. the canny thing in us always knows to whom we matter and to whom we don't. she knew her declaration would bother him, badly, not make him "khush." i'd have loved to hear her say some day, she knew even then they had a weird thing for each other, and tell him how much it had bothered her to even consider leaving delhi.
thankfully, the jalebis saved the day, and back khushi turned, to walk right back toward her rakshas, this time with a lovely rational excuse. they will run a sweet shop from bediji's empty space adjoining the garage. by dropping the chunari on her that morning, this is what devi maiya was hinting at. not to leave delhi.
asr held the chunari handed to him by di and remembered a girl in a storeroom, saving her dm, falling on her, her thoughts plagued him. shyam took the piece of cloth from his hand and tied it on the mirror. but by then what the chunari had to tie it already had. a girl who was an expert maker of sweets and a diabetic who'd be totally bowled over by her sweetness.
again i wonder, what if there were no dm to organise the proceedings and push the two stubborn ones toward each other? wouldn't love find its way anyway? are we capable of finding the right path through right thought and action on our own, or is life/the eternal's interference an axiomatic truth and requirement?
too many questions today. behaving like la in the kitchen. so cute, so clueless.
and here's a log of the most clued up one's dialogwas this episode for your enjoyment. nebher phere bhen mami's here.
1.
ee cookerwa bhi sasuma se poochke siti bajaayga ka?
will this cooker whistle only after asking ma in law?
2.
ari o miss teep taap kassyap...
oh miss tip top kassyap.
3.
ee pyaaj kati ho ki pyaajaaa
have you sliced onions or slashed them (loosely translated)
4.
hamri akhiyan ke kaajal se hote hain sab ghayal... dekho kaise chhum chhum bajti, dekho humri payal...
the kohl in my eyes breaks many a heart, now see how prettily my anklets (payal) ring... there was a playful hint by the dialogue guys about the payal that would ring quite a bell in her life.
5.
hello hi bye bye... arre aise isspoon se karogi toh rotiyan humre goldeyn jublee par banee.
hello hi bye bye, if you use a spoon to do that, then the dough will be ready on my golden jubilee.
6.
arre kaanstipessan baad mein, pehle kaam.
not constiptaion, first work.
7.
haan miss teep taap kassyap, tum singal pees ho.
yes, miss tiptop kassyap, you're a single piece.
how elated a girl who was ready to leave was at the plan she'd cooked up to stay back.
remember how sad she was when leaving seemed inevitable? and still she believes she wants to have nothing to do with him... hai re nand kissore.
and here was a man looking back yet again, next to him the one who never had any right to, but had no sense of wrong.
finally, a cap i couldn't resist. some day asr will take of those glasses that clouded his vision. this one, if we needed an excuse :) , is in anticipation of that.
......................
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