Laila, our dark haired beauty of the night is waiting for a glimmer of light in her very much arranged marriage.
A marriage bartered and brokered in tokens of respectability without a single exchange between the two people to whom it should matter most, and who end up bound by ties of tradition and seemingly, regret.
Laila, played with sad yearning by Alishba Yousuf, is a young ambitious girl, whose plans of studying French in Paris are seen as mere whims to the greater picture of not ending up “a homeless, childless, marriage-less, old maid”
Cruel strings to pull on such a young mind. Her mother’s desire to draw a different picture for her daughter’s life ends up thwarting Laila’s aspirations and desires at the altar of my pet peeve phrase –khandaani logg.
Replace moneyed for respectability, and that is a shade closer to what her mother (a likeable Parveen Malik in unlikeable traditional trading mummy role) seems to be talking about.
But why, I want to know no push back from our Laila? If you have such a supportive father (an always wonderful Qazi Wajid), who by the way joins in the running for Dad of the year, and enough intelligence and green backs to study French, why would you cave to pressure?
In a wonderful wordless sequence, she doesn’t defer her dreams, she destroys them.
When will we teach our girls and even boys for that matter, that their lives are their own and they have the right to live it instead of letting others make their life decisions and marriage is not and should not ever be the be all and end all of our aspirations.
Sketch your own fate lines, even if they don’t guarantee happiness. Your choices are your own.
Despite her no good leech of a husband, Kuku is oscillating between remembrance, regret and perhaps possibility as she continues to hang on to him. Or is it just revenge? Her encounter with Mansoor manages to get under his skin and he is now prickling at Khurram’s presence and Kuku’s silence.
Mansoor, already an opportunistic lover, is proving to be a callous and indifferent husband, and given his double speak along with Mommy dearest, a fairly traditional desi male. His only saving grace this time along with pitch perfect apathy and annoyance was that one miserly clean shaven scene that really upped Sohail Sameer’s hotness quotient.
Please someone end this spate of stubbled manliness, or lack thereof, and give us this day our clean shaven men. Ameen.
A shout out to the smart use of brevity in dialogue (wrong number) and expressions (Laila and her fathers moroseness, the swift about turn of Mrs Khan), heck, even the inopportune appearance of Khurram and his suspenders, as well as an attempt at sound design with the portable gramophone are commendable. Though there was some sketchy sound here, and it is freaky that she has more recent songs on 78s? Hipsterville this is not no?
Kuku isn’t caving to Mansoor just yet, but her sorrow soaked evening on the highway to regret (yes, I know its Adele but Bob Dylan comes first. Always) speaks as much to her frame of mind as it portends Laila’s fate as well. Doesn’t Kuku know by now, players only love you when they are playing?
Change your soundtrack Kuku, sometimes endings are new beginnings.
Laila’s underpinnings of hope and the spark of love and longing in her note to Mansoor…Ki meri ankhon mein noor aye… Mere sacche aansoo se aapne dil ko pak kar lo… speak volumes of things she isn’t yet privy to.
Whether she can face the crushing reality of Mansoor’s other lives and loves remains to be seen.
MM (aka A musing Muslim)
