‘Qarz E Jaan’ featured a shocking twist in this week’s episodes that underscored the bleak reality of how Pakistan men will continue to get away with the consequences of their crimes with the help of their rich and powerful family members, even when it comes at the cost of their own daughters.
In episode 29, Ammar (played by Nameer Khan) killed Asad, his younger sister’s husband during a clash involving their buildings. When the word of the crime gets to the family, once more we see the grandmother insisting Bakhtiar (played by Deepak Perwani) that he help Ammar escape jail, and completely ignoring that it was their own daughter who had suffered the consequences of his actions and is now a widow.
Time and time again, we have seen how the daadi and Bakhtiar belittled and punished the powerless around them such as Bisma and Nashwa, while aiding Ammar in his crimes like Maheen’s gang rape and then threatened her to remain silent or her private videos and pictures would be leaked. When Maheen stepped into their home, she had warned the family that they won’t be able to get away for so long with their crimes, as she had left her case to Allah.
In the recent episode Beenish walks back into the house after her in-laws kidnap her baby and threaten that she would never see him again unless Ammar got the death penalty, many users pointed out the shocking ways Beenish and Maheen looked similar as they entered the house, in a way echoing her last words to the family before she was killed.
Many social media users pointed out that Qarz E Jaan wasn’t the story of Nashwa, but of how predators like Ammar are made who continue wreck havoc upon society because they know their families will help them get away with it. As the user below wrote:
“Maturing is realizing QEJ was never the story of a victim .it was the story of a predator. We romanticized the wound and ignored the knife. If you save one victim, you save one life. But if you understand how a predator is made, and intervene, you have the power to save countless others.Sympathy is easy, Accountability is harder.”
Murderers like Ammar are left unchecked in how they exercise their power and privilege, but eventually as ‘Qarz E Jaan’ shows, the rot they spread eventually comes to their home with Beenish losing her husband and being kicked out of her home for the crimes of her brother.
Several users applauded Yumna and Fajr’s performance in the clip where Beenish curses her fate for being punished for the sins caused by Ammar even though she had never wronged anyone in her life.
“#QarzEJaan #YumnaZaidi | I feel pain..i feel numb. Beenu is paying for a crime she didn’t commit, it’s so unfair but her evil family needed a wake up call,and they got the most cruel one Beauty of qej is how every actor had their moment. Last two episodes belong to Fajr,” wrote one user.
“true depiction of reality how women have to pay for somebody else’s wrongdoings- my heart went out for beenish like first she lost her husband and now her child is taken away from her. her lines and helplessness as a mother is so well portrayed,” wrote another user.
As the mother aptly points out by the end of episode 30, Ammar became the man who he is now because of how his grandmother and father kept coddling him and refused to hold him accountable for his actions, and kept burying the trail of crimes he left behind to the point that it has reached their own home.
