It’s taken Sameera an awfully long time to take a stand for herself but that’s not the only thing wrong with Ruswai. Yet again, this week’s episode starts with Salman’s mother arriving at Sameera’s house and she and Warda — along with Sameera’s father — willing to let go of Salman’s heinous acts.
His mother and sister, blindly choose to defend him for the sake of it, defying all logic in their arguments as Salma very tactfully tries to twist Salman’s affair into a meaningless coffee date, comparing it to Sameera’s relationship with Dr Feroz. All the while Warda transforms into a younger version of her mother and shames Sameera for not respecting her mother.
We see Sameera’s father still hiding behind the Do-betian-hain excuse to not do anything to help Sameera’s situation, again. Sameera, on the other hand, is detached from all these dramatics and seems to be moving forward with her decision to raise a voice regarding her traumatic experience by apparently writing an article on her ordeal.
Read: Ep 4: Ruswai left us wondering why a woman carries the badge of honor in a family
Eventually though, Hamza is able to convince their father to go to Salman’s house and ask for divorce and haq meher. The tone of the episode changes when Pinky makes a surprise appearance and Salman confesses that he has married her in secret. It is then that Sameera’s father decides he has had enough of the niceties with Salman’s father who then tells Salman to leave the house along with Pinky.
Following this bizarre turn of events, Warda FINALLY realizes that her brother is not the angel she’s been making him out to bed. Salman’s father comes to Sameera’s house and offers to pay the haq meher in installments.
What is baffling in this entire situation is that it took Salman reaching the peak of being a horrid husband for people to realise that Sameera should divorce him and move on, including Sameera herself. Since Salman’s infidelity was the tipping point for everyone on the show, does that imply that the writers think that domestic abuse is a forgivable offence? Why did Sameera’s father so casually mention “Salman ney mara, peeta†as if that is something that can be brushed under the carpet in the name of compromise? Why do we as a society choose to treat domestic abuse as part of our culture as one of the things that ‘happen’ in a marriage? Why did her parents forcibly shove her back into Salman’s house after she was hospitalized for abuse but chose to draw the line at infidelity?
More importantly, why did Sameera not muster up the courage when she was being physically abused or even before that when Salman would often make her the object of his disgust? In doing so, she chose to label domestic abuse as an acceptable offence.
However, it’s too far in the show to address all these issues, and we can only hope the writer focuses more towards Sameera’s journey of speaking up, rather than how much lower Salman’s character can go before his mother comes down from her high horse, as we saw in next week’s promo.
You can watch the episode here:
