Ashar! Ashar! Enough already! Haven’t you learnt ANYTHING in the past four and a half years? Knew you were a tool, but such a big one?? How can you leave your once charming mother and your now bitter wife alone with each other, while you calmly take off for work or go looking for non-existent wedding pictures? Did you really expect these ladies to just forget the past and get along as if nothing had happened in the interim? Hasn’t it sunk in by now that they hate each other? Don’t you realize that the minute you turn your back they go at each other’s throats? You blithely plan family outings and when your daughter tries to tell you that dadi is mean to her and her mama, you seem surprised. Really? Are you that clueless? No wonder your life is a mess – you just don’t get it!!
Whew! Ok! So now that this rant against the hapless Ashar, brilliantly played by Fawad Khan, is out of the way, I can now take a deep breath and carry on.
In terms of the story, not much happened this week. It was a lethargic episode. The tensions between Fareeda, Atiqa Odho in excellent form here, and Khirad, a strictly average Mahira, continued to gather steam, and I can only hope that we are not made to wait till the very last episode to see the final showdown between the feuding mother and daughter-in-law pair. The long awaited letter, which Khirad had given to Jamal on that ill-fated night, also made its guest appearance today. I guess we’ll have to wait till next week to know how it ended up being tucked away among old photo albums. For more than half of the episode, Ashar appeared seemingly oblivious to the tension between his wife and mother. It is only when Hareem hints at the stress, that he makes a clumsy attempt to reason with his mother. I am at a total loss here and cannot comprehend why Ashar is being portrayed as such a loser. Surely, there must be some redeeming qualities to this man!!
Hareem’s upcoming surgery continues to bring Khirad and Ashar closer. Fawad was superb as the grieving, stressed out father. The scene where Ashar talks to Hareem about her hospitalization was sensitively done, as was the scene where he talks to Khirad after she is done praying for her daughter’s life. Mahira is okay on her own, but tends to appear flat in her scenes with either Fawad or Atiqa.
Overall, I found this to be an interesting but slow episode. Judging from the preview, next week promises to be more action-packed: Khizar’s return, Sarah’s breakdown, Hareem’s surgery, and Ashar’s confession that he still loves Khirad. Looking forward to the fireworks!
P.S. Was anybody else aggravated by the fact that the episode ended so abruptly. We didn’t get to see the Ashar/Sarah scene, the one we’d been shown in the preview for this episode. At first I thought it was a problem with the link I watching and so went to watch another one, but still the same – aarghh!! What was the point of that? So not funny!!
Written by SZ ~
