episode 277 may i have this dance

sometimes a thing is so perfect i just sit back and watch astounded, a happiness spreading. i still remember the first time i saw this teri meri sequence. i had no idea that was about to happen... asr was sitting with his back against a wall, despair etched across his visage and loneliness, when suddenly he seemed to go right into himself and then this appartion like thing rose from within and walked out.

i had of course seen such things in movies and somehow asr doing that was just not in any way asr. by now the lack of barun had started taking its toll and i think i was ready to throw up my hands and do a dramatic shrug to denote this episode to was a goner... when i noticed a crazy weird wonder yearning something in his eyes and the white linen shirt... billowing... also there were fairy lights.

think my post the next day said, he has stolen that shirt from my cupboard since i am a white linen lover and often in my floaty white shirts.
 

he looked like a sailor who had spotted a mermaid while lost at sea and scatterbrained from too much sun.

i went looking for my piece on crooner and here is what i'd written to honeypriya, i feel exactly that even now:

hope you did read my note on the extra-logical space i roam with ipk.

this story pulls me somewhere else, makes me want to flow with it. you are right, its storyteller is different, touched by something way outside the normal span of television narratives. great writers often speak of how a character comes to life and leads the teller, has that happened with the story of ipk? does it call its writers to frontiers unknown and they follow finding the right path through sheer instinct and extreme skill?

i didn't see a dream there. i saw that flowing of two inseparables toward each other. she stood there on the spot where such dreams had started, a payal clasped on, and thought of him intensely. he lifted his head and left his body without volition as though he'd heard something and looked and there she was, in the colours of the surf, the waves, the ocean, the sky, and he in his pearlescent white went and merged with her. that perfectly poised streak of red on her forehead and the dance of ebb and flow told the tale of a man who longed for his mate, his patni, and a woman who grew from a girl to a woman only after he made a mark in her life. the words cascaded in perfect meaning and time stopped meaning anything. only three and a half minutes?

i floated with them for hours. they were in my room last night, i counted my loose white linen shirts, had he taken one of them?

i am so with you on this neo-surreal heightening of the story. it is precisely that. the linking of dreams from her nightmare amid thorns with its scattered pearls, payal, key. we have been touching those clues in reality, in surreality. and why surreality seems not at all absurd is because those who have loved know it isn't.

beyond the oceans, beyond the skies, where galaxies swim in endless seas, love takes you there and says, come meet. to flow into the vast embrace of this emotion you have to give hard reality a slip from time to time, for that's where the emotion lives, nurtures, grows; sometimes so much it becomes a story, a story we want to hear again and again. and feel in our lives.

for a while now, ever since the initial attraction between two people started to change colour and enter their beings, till love has found utterance in faraq padta hai and saansey ruk jaygi, we've been to extra real spaces with them. the dreams, the reveries, the hut with its magical trove of required things. i am spellbound by this daring stretch of imagination. grateful that someone was willing to take that risk.

(i have taken out a part i no longer feel the same about... shall chat about it at the end.)

sanaya looked beautiful yesterday. and i don't mean just physically. the girl growing up into a woman that i first witnessed on that walk from anjali's room to arnav and her room straight after his i love you, the one who fearlessly walked into her dream with him, extending her hand and silencing his remorse, she has grown even more into the woman who is his patni, in bangla a lovely word, stree. yes priya, i agree as yet an innocent wife, beautiful isn't it. oh she was definitely there with him today, and even after he returned to the cell and sat down, she took a moment before walking away slowly.


his "khushi!" bridged surreal and the three dimensions that bind us. as she spun around, desperation in her eyes, she was a wife who can hear the call as she lands back in reality and their meeting is over for the moment.
hitchcock comes to mind sometimes when i look at the kidnap and the planning and plotting. all of this is just red herring, mcguffin, the real story is that pyaar. and of course, sanaya, is classic hitchcock leading lady, cool on the outside, smouldering within. so we had read way back in college. didi ki saut they might have wanted to call it but iss pyaar ko kya naam doon? wanted to get written. so happy the writers didn't resist.

this is what i scribbled and edited as i watched the scene this time.
a girl stands waiting by the water thinking of the one she loves... classic lover's demeanour and pose, a lost air, bereft... viraha. she is radha, she is heer, she is khushi by their poolside and he isn't there. what use is the balcony to juliet if romeo isn't going to climb to it... what use is the poolside to khushi if arnav ji won't bully her here and make her walk backward in terror, in desire, or kiss her, or slip on that payal.

the stars shine up there... i think of you... payal, make me wear that payal again... brush the lock off my forehead, touch my face, love me... hold my dupatta in your hand draw me close... kiss me... i miss you... 

yet, he is not that far away, he can feel you thinking, he lifts his head, a baffling despair...

and from deep in him, a part does rise... that which nothing can shackle, nor harm, nor burn... na hannyate, it cannot be destroyed...

within us, the eternal part that is really truly us...

and before him she floats, also arisen... never to be held down or tied... she seeks him and he is here. he yearns for her and look, there she is.

this is the story of a love that perhaps should not be told, just felt. and danced to.

what might have been ridiculous... two actors never failed to make sublime.

the wind came swishing like the breath of the universe, saansey... and wrapped space in its dream...

among hard naked bulbs, fairy lights gleamed... in a hard, heartless space filled with cartons and odd wooden furniture, ladders, ropes and remarkably unpretty things, the essence of two people met and merged and made love and everything was, in direct contrast to what was all around, absolutely beautiful. 

it was a set and yet it was not... 

a girl in white with trimmings of prussian blue stood with an air that said she was sad, she missed him, where was he...

a white shirt billowed, here, i was here all the time... sand and surf and oceans met, pearls dropped through the mingling...

where are you? i am here... your and mine, mine and your... our story of love is difficult...

why do you smile at me, girl in flying dupatta, always there you're always there, the touch of your dupatta near my bosom, my chest...

how her dupatta always knew how to find him... unerringly from that day at the mazar and so many times later... and when a dupatta flew from his hand, it had known where to land... where to find her.

the wind rises and calls the lovers to prayer, to belief, for this is a temple surely, a place sacred and precious and pure... (so those sham temple bells were perhaps perfectly placed here, who knows.)

walk, i will walk to you, lover, crossing barriers that i have carefully nurtured and held my world steady with... walls of reason, impenetrable, insurmountable, but see i walk through it now and over it... for the wind does call...

and i will come to you like a wave, the ocean or am i just a sad lonely girl by the water, missing my lover...  yet here i am, come to you... reason? was there ever a need for that, did my heart ever grasp one, i was here even when reason said i oughtn't be.

teri meri meri teri
prem kahani hai mushkil...
do lavzon mein yeh bayan na ho paye

ek doojey se hue jooda jab ek dooje ke liye bane...

lovers meet and unite... feel and touch each other... turn and flow without any shame, any taboo, skin invites the feel of love, skin awakens and reaches... the flesh is as much a part of our essential selves, and our identity too.

his arm reached out when she reached him and he touched her lower back with a sense of right, possessive, he jerked her close to him, slamming against her skin. she stayed there straining against him, her body arched...

the first time they danced to these words together, they both longed yet didn't know how to say it even to themselves... yet before everyone their desire did assert itself and take them away to a world where no one but they were present... there was an escape from the three dimensional even then.

now they both know what they seek, and their yearning gathers force creating a world where indeed no one but just the two of them embrace, circle, hold and possess and speak of love without saying a word... in a parallel realm. and the song plays.

he held her face in his hands not quite believing it was indeed she. and she was gone. he felt lost, but then she came running to him and held him tight... she told him she couldn't live without him perhaps. he turned and grasped her in the most tender and yet sensual embrace...

  

tumse dil jo lagaya toh jahan maine paya...

kyun khuda tuney aisa mujhe khab a dikhaya jab haqiqat mein use todna tha...

he smiled at her as he sang... why such dreams must be shown if they are only to be broken.

the walls returned and the naked bulb, he was alone. but "khushi!" he said out loud as though calling out to someone not too far away... and she did hear him.

she did. every time.

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however the first time i saw this episode, i had written some things which i no longer view the same way... at that point i had not seen the whole show and was still brimming with hope. i wrote:

"anjali got an obvious and clear moment to start getting curious. nice opening.

shyam at the poolside, i rather enjoyed, again great writing, there was his desire to be everything he isn't namely, asr. that's the feeling i got. if only a poolside and a chair and a few billion rupees is all it took to make an asr."

yes, anjali could have grown into a really interesting character, had they stuck to an idea and progressed it. she saw khushi and shyam together a couple of times, even noticed it, yet later these were not even referred to.

and no, this time when i saw shyam at the poolside, i just wanted to haul him up and throw him out. but it was a clever way of telling us just how badly he wanted to be as big and on top of things as his saaley saab. so he sat on asr's chair at asr's poolside and planned to swipe asr's money, property and yes, asr's wife.

might have been great, but again, weak melodramatic dialogues and loud direction and acting.

one last thought: there were two palats by khushi in the episode. one to shyam and the other to asr... i wonder again was this mirroring thing done deliberately or it was just a coincidence.

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