Between forbidden fruit and fear

Pamaal, a drama serial drawing huge audiences these days with Saba Qamar, as Malika, in the female lead, seems to be the story of every household. The emotional ebb and flow in the marital relationship between Malika and her husband has intrigued everyone. After every episode, the men and their wives are involved in intense arguments about who is at fault. Ironically, what the drama wants couples to avoid — the argumentative battle for supremacy — gets activated in real time.

In the eleventh episode, Malika is arrested by the police from an apartment where some unethical activities were going on. Actually, Malika had gone there to share korma with a just-met friend. Her husband, an irascible and overly cautious person, finds the moment to prove right his judgement of Malika that she doesn't know the ways of the world so thoroughly as he does. He couldn't swallow the ignominy caused by his wife's detention at a police station for allegedly being involved in some suspicious activities.

As the story of the drama is narrated by Malika in an interview, she recalls — in the context of the above incident, or rather accident — that she feared her husband more than the police. In the interview, Malika narrates as an aside a story from her childhood that once she was playing with her friends and one of the friends got injured. The injured friend exclaimed that she was crying not out of injury but because of the punishment she would receive from her mother.

The fear of her husband and that of the police are poles apart because of their origins. The former originates from her husband's care and caution for her, while the latter from what the police are notorious for — their harsh treatment. Some viewers judge the husband's reaction as rash and relentless, while some justify it on the demands of objective correlative.

The transgression was inadvertent, she admits imploringly before her husband, but he, in his fit of fury, leaves her to her parents. His knee-jerk reaction seems both logical and harsh, but the comparison Malika makes between two fears is feministically biased. The drama writer's feminism in the drama is too conspicuous and biased to be ignored. It's said that when a writer's philosophy of life overshadows art, the art ceases to be art.

However, the incident makes all the audience nurturing conflicting opinions go through catharsis. The feminists feel relieved that the weaker moments that can cause misunderstanding are galore and that Malika can't be blamed for what she has done to herself and her husband. This judgement is based on dramatic irony – the audience knows what the characters don't. On the other hand, the patriarchs justify the husband's reaction, keeping in view his psychotic character vis-a-vis a society that has a morbid psyche against women.

The drama writer has touched the archetypal Biblical theme of Adam, Eve and Satan. Malika, the Eve, defied her husband's wishes and orders – the Adam's forbidding of the Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit. Malika's friend is Satan, who becomes the cause of her ordeal.

In nature, the most resilient ecosystem is the one that promotes mutualism between the species of diverse nature. Take the lichen – a composite organism that grows on rocks and old trees. It's the classic example of mutual dependence between two lives: a fungus and an alga. The former is responsible for the structure and protection, while the latter provides sustenance through photosynthesis. Lichen is an apt metaphor to understand and validate Bano Qudsia's philosophy of marital dependency.

The viewers are eager to see which way the story ends because every couple experiences the same bullish surges and bearish lows in their marital enterprise. If the story ends on divorce, it would not entertain the majority of viewers. Contrarily, a transformative reconciliation will bloom smiles on many a face. The course of the story so far and the narrator's subjective commentary suggest separation as the likely conclusion. But the allusion to the Biblical archetype helps us predict a happy-ever-after ending.