The drama Pamaal has created waves for the right reasons. It’s a drama that so many women are relating to and opening up about their own lives or the lives of people that they know.
Malika (Saba Qamar) is married to Raza (Usman Mukhtar) and they have a troubled marriage because of his extreme possessiveness. But the way that he deals with her, flip flopping between love and anger, caging her in her home and then letting her go out, mostly with him, is the quintessential narcissist that a lot of Pakistani women have lived with – or so it seems by the comments that are going around about the drama.
The pain Malika faces is also intense where she loves him but is unable to leave him. When she does leave him, her mother convinces her to go back with the typical reasons – patience, sabr, shame, badnaami. What hits you harder is that Malika’s mamoo is more receptive to her needs and her self respect. It’s so heartbreaking to see Malika raise herself up and try to break the pattern and the life she is in and then be pushed down by herself and her mother. And it’s so bittersweet that she says that she would never do that to her daughter.
What also hits hard in these episodes is that she has resigned herself to believe that she can’t do things herself. She tells Raza that she can’t go out on her own, she’s too used to going with him, she goes shopping with her sister-in-law and her sister in law’s watch stops working and she doesn’t realise that it’s time to pick up her daughter. And Malika gets very, very upset, borderline hyperventilating and you can feel the trauma she’s living in and is now so used to that she doesn’t even realise that there is a way to be free. The queen we saw in the beginning is now the slave and doesn’t even know it anymore.
The hope is that we know that she either leaves him or manages to push herself out of her cage to become an acclaimed and famous writer and is now telling her story. A story that is so painful for so many to watch.
In the recent episodes, 12-14 we know that she’s spent a lot of years with Raza, with a daughter in school and we know about the turning point in her life when Raza is arrested for corruption.
How will she raise herself up to become the woman she was meant to be? And what’s worse is, if Raza wasn’t arrested and standing over her with the key of the cage, would she have been able to get out?
Only time will tell and we can’t wait see how she finally breaks through and re-emerges as the Malika that she is.