15/11 Dragon Club: Aarti Decides

There is a battle raging within Aarti between the Dubeys and Yash. Until now, the Dubeys have always come out winning, simply because they have been able to coax her to trust them over and above anyone else. She listened to Dubey when he told her not to reveal the divorce lie, and she listened to Shobha when she convinced her that Prashant was dead and Aarti should forget about the lie. That was because she had no other guiding force to turn to. They were her the strongest influence on her whenever she was most vulnerable, taking advantage of what they knew of her past and her nature. The last time we saw this was when Shobha told Aarti not to tell Yash about her pregnancy right away, and in a bid to stop her made the connection between Prashant and Yash, which forced Aarti to feel like there was no alternative to running away. Yash had a claim on Aarti's mind ever since the kidnapping because of his default, natural goodness, but because he was not consciously exercising his effect on her, and behaved badly with her because of his past baggage, the Dubeys were able to overpower Aarti's instinctive inclination to trust Yash every time it sprung up. After the Lalitpur reunion, Yash has started discovering Aarti and the more he sees, the more he wants. Until he was not over Arpita, he wanted her to remain in the box of the children's mother and his parents' bahu, and that worked for the Aarti in denial perfectly because she could just project the part of herself that he wanted to see, and that she wanted to see.

But now that he has actually let Arpita go and allowed himself to unfurl the feelings he has for Aarti, he finds he wants all of her, and that is when it starts to bother him that she is hiding something from him. It is not a known fact yet, but a sense that despite how devoted Aarti is to him and his family, she shares something with the Dubeys that she doesn't share with them...and more importantly with him. It is only yesterday that I saw Yash actually fighting for all of Aarti, with the Dubeys (albeit in his characteristic gentlemanly way). He wants to stake his claim on her, as the person who understands her best, and for that he wants to know all her secrets and all her worries. His stress on equality had very strong subtext, one that I have been perceiving since his reaction to Mumbai and uss raat. I said then that he could sense Aarti hiding something from him, the unequal sharing of personal pasts and emotions. He perceived the fact that she had gotten him to open up without revealing an ounce more of herself than the cheerful facade she always presented. And unfortunately because of uss raat, he perceived that gap as her trying to trap him on purpose...why else should there be inequality in their sharing? Yes, Yash definitely senses the barrier and is fighting, tooth and nail, for it to come down.

And for the first time, he is winning. Today, probably the most significant moment in the episode for me was when Aarti timidly broached the possibility to the Dubeys that Yash would agree. The way she said it showed the effect the Dubeys have had on her mind because she proposed the possibility of Yash being okay with the BMT as though she was saying something preposterous... or in Shobha's words pagal and nadaan. It shows how much the Dubeys, especially Shobha, have convinced her that Yash will never forgive her for her deception, and that this one lie will bring down her entire world and marriage. It breaks my heart because this paints a picture of all of Aarti's blood, sweat and tears for the Scindia family, which she could proudly stand by in telling them the truth and expecting their forgiveness, fall short of her one transgression, the divorce lie. But Yash's repeated assertions of his trust and his being there for her, have actually started getting through to Aarti. The first sign was when she tried to find him before leaving SM, as though finally registering that they were a team. And now, she says that she can't make this decision without him. Aarti has finally let Yash into her head and her heart and that is precisely why the Dubeys had to stoop to such a low to get through to her, and even then they have only managed to get her into a conundrum, not to agree to their wishes.

I would feel bad for them, especially Shobha, if I didn't see this as the culmination of a pattern that the CVs have always been building. Today Shobha made Aarti feel selfish for wanting to tell Yash the truth and getting his permission. She said the words, "as long as your son is with you, what does it matter what happens to mine?" basically stating it literally. This resonated really strongly with what Prashant said to Aarti when he left her: that she was selfish and didn't think about anyone but herself. Every day I am understanding more and more how much this family failed to understand the gem they had amongst them. It is really a question of principles. Aarti and Yash are both absolutists when it comes to principles, while both the Dubeys and the Scindias display fair-weather principles and are willing to be cut-throat, deceptive and manipulative when necessary. When it is serving them, Aarti's principles are something to be admired, but when it is going against them, it becomes selfishness. This is what Prashant asserted and this is what Shobha said today too, making Yash the proverbial cheese that stands alone in understanding the way Aarti is wired...because he works the same way. That is why he was so eager to get her to promise the no-secrets thing, because he knew once he got her to agree, she would not back down from her word. But he is trying to be subtle in coaxing whatever truth she is guarding out of her, so as to not stress her out.

Finally, the thing that really shocked me about Shobha today and wiped away the last traces of sympathy, was her differentiation between Ansh and the new baby. I always appreciated how Ansh called the Dubeys badi-mummy and bade-papa, not acknowledging his relationship to them through Prashant, in which case he would have called them dada and dadi. It was incredibly striking and frankly shocking to hear Shobha go on today about how Ansh was her pota and this was her naatin. Doesn't the fact that Aarti became their daughter mean that Ansh became their naatin too? Clearly not! Her technical dissection of the relationships was deeply, deeply disturbing and further emphasised her distinction between Palak, Payal, new kid on the one hand, and Ansh on the other. I am surely not saying that Ansh can't be both the Dubeys' and the Scindias' potha, but it was Shobha's rhetoric that really threw me off in the way the she differentiated between Ansh, her pota, and the unborn child, her naatin. It is almost as though she was setting the foundation for the BMT appeal. They are subliminally trying to assert their right over Ansh in any way they can, so they resort to the patriarchal conventions which defines him as their pota, because Aarti was their bahu then. Contrast this with Yash's equality, and the mind boggles!