Folks,
Do you think I should have simply called it The Body on the Bed? Agatha Christie, with her The Body in the Library, would surely have approved, but I think, on the balance, that I will stay with this one!
It was a crackerjack, humdinger of an episode. All those cribbing that Yudh was slow must now be busy eating their words, for the script is now not just moving, it is galloping, and one is hard put to keep pace with the onscreen goings on. So now look out for their complaining that it is too fast-moving and too complex, and needs a second viewing to make it out properly!😉 Not that they would be wrong, for every episode of Yudh needs at least a second viewing.
This time, I am going to take us scene by scene from the beginning, so that we can spot both the crossed wires and the red herring, which is a huge one. Ok, here goes.
The veiled threat: The opening scene of Yudh landing up at Nikhil's door was excellent in more ways than one. First of all, they edited out Yudh's urgent query, "Are you sure?", to whomever he is talking to as he strides towards Nikhil's entrance door . It is only as he starts quizzing Nikhil that those listening closely learn that it was about Mamta's (non) membership of the Excalibur club.
It is on this peg that Yudh hangs his whole casus belli against Nikhil, implicitly if not explicitly. For though he never tries to blackmail Nikhil with this unsavoury secret, and talks instead only of his culpability, due to his inaction rather than criminal action, in the hospital wing collapse and the deaths and injuries that resulted from it, the Nikhil-Mamta illicit relationship is always there, hanging in the air, as a potential weapon.
Nikhil knows this , and yet he turns Yudh down and refuses to testify about the crime as an eyewitness. This is only natural, for not only would his liaison with Mamta be blown wide open, with considerable damage to them both, but Nikhil himself would land in the dock as an accessory before the fact for his failure to report the matter at once to the police. But his refusal to oblige Yudh too is not revealed to us at the end of the first scene, but only during Yudh's discussion with Anand in their office.
For me, the paisa vasool moments in this segment were, first, when Yudh, responding to Nikhil's startled Aap?, replies Han, main! , with all the arrogant self-assurance of Amitabh Bachchan in his prime. Next, when he is assuring Nikhil that he can trust him, Yudh, because Nikhil's affair with a married woman is not his concern, the voice says one thing and the face says another. The lips are drawn back in a mocking smile, and the eyes are amused but probing, trying to assess which way the cat will jump.
The red herring: This is no herring; it is something red but as big as a baby salmon!
Yudh and Anand are discussing the situation after Nikhil refuses to play ball, asserting that it would serve no purpose and that Anuj Malik had won. In response to Anand's query "Kya aap use (Anuj Malik ko) jeetne denge?", Yudh asserts that given the dead and the wounded, they could not let Anuj Malik get away with it. Kucch to karna padega. Anand looks either curious as to what Yudh is planning to do to fix Anuj Malik, or mystified. I could not make out which from his habitually poker face.
Next comes the restaurant scene where Anuj Malik is handed the mystery CD. His reactions to its contents are spot on: disgust and shame, instant concern about whether someone else in the restaurant has seen anything of what was playing on his laptop, and then raging anger as he races back home and up the beautiful trelliswork staircase. As he reaches his bedroom, he is almost hit by a bullet that smashes a mirror instead , and drops at once to the floor. There is a second shot, and he rushes in, only to find a body on the bed, that of Mamta.
We shall come back to this segment in a little while, but now let us fast forward a bit to the scene in Yudh's office, as the inevitable Breaking News declares that Anuj is the prime suspect for the murder of his wife, and, far more relevant to Yudh & Co., that Anuj's camera (assumed to be so by the police, of course, as it was found in his rooms) contained the same hospital footage as in the CD, and that too with the time and date which fitted exactly with the hospital wing collapse. Yudh, it would seem, is now in the clear on the hospital wing collapse affair.
Anand is clearly on cloud nine, and Mona talks, with profound relief, of a lucky break. Which is where the red herring floats into view. For what does Yudh say in reply? Lucky? Tum log to jaante ho ki main luck main vishwas nahin rakta.Now what can this mean? If it is not luck, as he asserts, it can reasonably be assumed that Yudh made it happen, that it was not a case of serendipity but of deliberate planning to achieve this end.
Next, he sighs deeply and looks sad as he adds that he feels very bad about Mamta's death. Agar iski maut ke bagair hamari sachchayi sabit ho jaati to zyada achcha hota.
The curious thing here is that he does not speculate in the least, at this point, as to who would have made the CD of Nikhil and Mamta and sent it to Anuj, or about how and why Nikhil's camera - for Yudh, Anand and Mona all know that the camera was Nikhil's - was found in Anuj's bedroom.
So, at this point and on the basis of the evidence shown to the viewers, even a disinterested onlooker could be forgiven for assuming that Yudh is the deus ex machina behind this sordid tragedy, and the accompanying camera evidence that would exculpate him from a serious charge and restore the reputation of his firm and his own.
We, the viewers, of course know that the culprit is not Yudh, but it is not possible to prove that as yet. The red herring is, as of now, alive and kicking.
It is only much later that he is shown speculating, with Anand, about Kaun hai jo humko itna help karna chah raha hai? Anand is of course more worried about the negative publicity for Yudh and his firm courtesy Dharmendra Malik and his vehement insistence that his innocent son is being framed by YS.
At the end of this scene, Yudh's face, after Anand and Mona leave, is drawn, tight, brooding, and inscrutable. What is he thinking of? One does not know.
Everything now seems to hinge on the forensics report about the authenticity of the camera footage found in Anuj's room. I am as anxious about it as poor Mona, standing in the doorway of the lab, with worry written large on her face!
Questions, questions!: The Mamta murder case is literally bristling with questions for which there are, right now, no answers.
For one thing, there has to be an actual murderer, who shot her just as Anuj collapsed in the doorway to his bedroom after having, as he would assume, barely escaped the first shot. As a matter of fact, that shot was clearly a deliberate miss, for the murderer meant all along to make Anuj the scapegoat, and it would not have worked at all if he was dead!
I wonder how the investigative officer explained that shot. Probably that Anuj shot first at Mamta and missed, and hit the mirror instead.
Anuj then, following the time honoured SOP for all murder suspects, obliges by picking up the murder weapon, and conveniently leaving his fingerprints on it. 😉But I am sure it was his own licensed gun after all -the murderer would have made sure of that ! - so the frame up would have worked even if Anuj Malik had remembered something from any of the crime thrillers he might have read, and carefully avoided picking up the gun. The actual killer would of course have worn gloves; even a child knows that these days!
I am here assuming that the plotter behind the crime is neither Yudh nor Anand, for even leaving the moral angle aside, Anand would never make such a very tricky and potentially dangerous move without Yudh's knowledge and approval.
The person who made the CD must have been a very fast worker if he got it ready only after the Yudh-Nikhil meeting, and he (or she) had learnt about the dead end in which Yudh then found himself. Or maybe he had collected the video footage and kept it ready for any eventuality. Either way, contrary to Nikhil's firm belief that no one but Yudh and Anand had penetrated their secret, the plotter must have known of the Nikhil-Mamta liaison, which means that he must be very close to at least one of the two.
That person must also have had a reason for exposing the guilty couple to Anuj Malik at this precise point, timing it to perfection, being sure that Anuj would immediately rush home to confront his guilty wife. He clearly intended to frame Anuj for Mamta's murder, which he committed, or commissioned with a supari.
He also planted Nikhil's camera, with the hospital wing conspiracy footage, in Anuj-Mamta's room. This one would (as against the CD, which could have come from anyone at all) lead the track back to the only person who would benefit from this discovery: Yudh.
Once this connection was made, it would be but a step for almost everyone to interpret the murder of an unfaithful wife by her jealous husband, after he had seen the proof of her infidelity on the CD, as caused, indirectly but surely, by the sender of the CD. Who else, it would be argued, could it be but Yudh again?
The two halves of the Anuj"Mamta case, the CD-inspired-murder by Anuj (as it would be assumed by everyone, including Yudh and the police) and the camera evidence, would thus be fused into a whole, and the finger of suspicion would point squarely at Yudh.
Seen like this, it would appear that the whole purpose of this elaborate exercise - which also included the despatch of a full set of all the material about Mamta, including the CD, to all the TV news agencies bar the Daily News - was meant solely to trap Yudh into a potentially very dangerous situation, where he could be accused of having instigated Anuj to murder his wife and at the same time make him the accused in the hospital wing collapse.
I expect that your head is spinning already😉, but there is yet another puzzle. Remember what Mamta's father is telling the police? He says Bolti hi ja rahi thi, keh rahi thi: Papa, jaldi yahan aa jao, nahin to wo mujhe maar dalega! There does not seem to be any reason for him to lie about this matter, so let us take it that it was true.
So that would mean that Mamta was afraid for her life. But from whom? She could not have known about the CD being handed over to Anuj, so why should she have been so afraid of Anuj as to call and tell her father to come and protect her?
But if she was deliberately lying to her father in order to implicate Anuj, she must have been intending to create a near-but-not-quite-fatal situation where she could get Anuj arrested for attacking her and then divorce him on those grounds.
If this was so, the plan went horribly awry from Mamta's point of view. But of course not from the point of view of her collaborator, who must always have intended the attack to be a fatal one that would be foisted on to the unlucky Anuj. Who could her collaborator have been but Nikhil? Which opens up a Pandora's box, for Nikhil would then have to be very different from what he appears to be. Not an ardent lover wanting to get rid of an inconvenient husband by hook or by crook, but a devious plotter who means to get rid of both of them at on go. But why? This is a puzzle at this point.
If the culprit is indeed Nikhil - and the jury is still out on this ! - why then he does a terrific job of portraying helpless grief, loss and rage. His encounter with the hapless Anand is ferocious enough to convince anyone that he is the prime sufferer.
Contagious violence: If the sudden rage attack that drives him to literally give Mukesh Chhabra, the Daily News boss, the bum rush from his office, is due to his Huntingdon's syndrome, Chhabra's smashing of all the windows of the car gifted to him is clearly a mini homage to the explosive Amitabh of the 1970s and 1980s. It is a very uncharacteristic gesture for a press magnate, and it would surely have set a very bad example for the watching kids, especially the one whose bat Chhabra throws into the battered car. One of them, if not more, is likely to copy him when some grown up angers him for whatever reason.
But it was marvellous to see Yudh give the obnoxious Chhabra the old Bachchan treatment, and the fury with which he demanded to know who had let this chap into his office, following this up by sweeping the table lamp off the table, with one fell swing of his arm sending it crashing to the floor, was vintage Amitabh. Mazaa aa gaya!
Equally striking, though in a very different way, is Yudh's body language when Anand comes into his room later. His shoulders are hunched, arms hanging down, head bowed. He knows full well that he has gone way too far in his reaction to Chhabra's needling, but catch him acknowledging it! The offhand, would-be-casual approach he adopts to cover up is superbly nuanced.
The Achilles heel: I liked the sober, matter of fact way in which Yudh's neurologist advises him to protect himself, by legal means, against the consequences of the likely damage he might do, to others and to himself, when he has these hyper fits and sharp mood swings due to his disease. The doctor is equally, or rather more concerned about the tension created in the aftermath of these hyper attacks making Yudh's disease get worse.
Either way, this syndrome of his is going to be Yudh's Achilles heel. It is not clear what he is going to do about the legal angle; he has not even told Anand or Nayantara about his illness as yet. But the 1-2 weeks absence abroad of the specialist is worrying, for no substitute doctor can have the same in depth of knowledge of the patient's condition, and given how fast things are moving in all directions, 2 weeks will be a long time for Yudh.
Domestic vignettes: The whole conversation between Yudh and Nayantara about Rishi was charmingly typical - the worried, fretting mother and the reassured, reassuring, and hopeful father. As was Nayantara's confession to Mona that she had had no idea of all the stress her husband had been under of late, for which she blamed herself and her preoccupation with Rishi.
Yudh may not feel deeply about his wife, but he is always patient with her demands and her fears. This time, he handles her vociferous complaint about his being slandered by Dharmendra Malik with admirable patience, and also clearly and convincingly.
At the other end of the spectrum, and harrowing in the tragedy it portends, is the scene between Anand and his wife, discussing about their autistic son, who is increasingly aggressive and very hard to handle for his mother. He has hit her and left a bad bruise , and things can only get worse from now on. She thus wants to send the boy to a special school for such children, and Anand reacts to this with stunned disbelief, saying, Hamara beta hai! To which she responds, with bitter resignation, Isi baat ka to dukh hai ki wo hamara beta hai.
Now 90 persons out of a 100 would blame her for not living up to the popular image of the ever patient, never discouraged, never tired mother of an autistic child. But I would not blame her at all. As the Lord Jesus said, Let he who has never sinned cast the first stone. No one who has not suffered as she must be doing, unable to cope, day in and day out, with a physically powerful but mentally challenged, and now increasingly aggressive child, and given a husband who is never there because of the demands of his job, can understand what she is going thru. It is not that she loves her son any less. It is rather that she is by now at the end of her tether, and if nothing is done soon, something has got to give, and she will crack up.
In between these two extremes is the somewhat mystifying conversation between Mona and her sister about the latter's husband Kapil, who has gone AWOL for nearly a year now. What Mona says, about the need for her sister to pull herself together and get on with her life, makes perfect sense. But then her sister will have none of it, and she clings to her belief that her husband will return to her. For to do otherwise would be to accept that he was a good for nothing, which means that her judgment was bad, or that she could not hold him, which would be worse!
I do not as yet see where these diverse strands are going to be woven into the fabric of the narrative, but rest assured, they will be.
Dark doings ahead: The charmingly feckless and now sunny-tempered Rishi is clearly on the verge of being snatched by the Naxalites, thanks to their mole in the guest house, very likely his cook-cum-bearer. I do not know if he will have time to distribute the cricketing equipment he has bought for those local kids, or to discuss the security precautions over the telephone with his father. Neither, I would imagine.
But why did Yudh not take care of these arrangements before parking Rishi there? Surely he knew about the security risks involved even before he put in his bid?
I look forward to Rishi's interactions with his captors, and to seeing how his quaint philosophy of life works on them. I do hope the director does not either over simplify or romanticize the situation, and portray the Naxalites as Robin Hood and his merry men. They are might have begun thus, but by now they are anything but Robin Hoods.
Darkness descends: This is about Yudh's worsening health, which the sharp Taruni diagnoses at once, from seeing his nervous tic at the press conference, as the incurable Huntington's syndrome. I wonder why Nayantara resents the very presence of Yudh's daughter from his first marriage so much. Surely Taruni is a fac t of Yudh's life that she, as his present wife and a practical woman, should accept? I am sure she has not been kept in the dark about his earlier marriage to Gauri, why should she have been?
Crossed wires: Now for the other half of the title.
-Yudh thinks that Anuj murdered his wife, but he does not understand how and why the CD got made and sent to Anuj and the TV channels. Nor does he understand how and why Nikhil' s camera got to Anuj's place. He is wrong about the primary issue, the murder. Once he understands that, the second part of the puzzle will fall into place.
-Nikhil thinks (or pretends to think, but that is a far off option) that Yudh made and distributed the CD, including to Anuj, and thus got Mamta murdered by Anuj. He also thinks Yudh had his camera stolen from his room and planted in Anuj's room, to salvage his firm's reputation. He is wrong on both counts.
-Anuj knows that he has not murdered his wife. He has no idea who has done it, of what this camera is all about, or how it got to his room. He and his father have, in a curious parallel with Nikhil, a single point explanation for everything that has happened: It is a YS conspiracy to frame Anuj. They are wrong thru and thru.
These people have all got their wires crossed. The only one who is clear about what he has done and why is the shady entity, as yet without either a face or a name, who has created this bhool bhulaiya and plonked all our key characters inside it. And us too, of course! Let us see if, and when , we are able to find our way out of this maze.
Shyamala B.Cowsik
PS: Once again, please do hit the Like button, of course providing you survived this and actually liked it!😉
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