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With the start of 2018, a few new TV plays have taken up airtime across various channels in the hope to become the next big obsession for the massive television market. One such drama is the Fahad Mustafa produced, Nibah.

Starring Asif Raza Mir, Savera Nadeem, and Aamina Sheikh, the play explores marital life and the consequences of tragedies onto families who lose their loved ones. In its first episode, we find Saiqa (Savera) – a humble homemaker, whose whole life revolves around her children and her husband, Shaheer (Asif Raza Mir) – trying her best to keep her domestic tasks sorted.

The palatial house brims with love, and the theme for the first episode at least, shows a cookie-cutter example of a ‘perfect family.’ However, much like the glum – sometimes predictable twists in Pakistani plays, we find misfortune hitting the family.

While the story in the first half doesn’t really focus on more than just showing how perfect Saiqa is, it does introduce us to Sofia (Aamina Sheikh). A teacher, who co-incidentally also teaches Saiqa’s son, Sofia is in a crisis of her own as her Nikkah – which took place three years ago and hasn’t turned into a nuptial– seems to be the issue at hand for her whole family.

Without many meandering twists, the story finds itself at a place when it’s revealed that Saiqa has cancer and is terminal. In such a situation, she takes a dying promise from Shaheer and asks him to get married again once she passes. Although it hasn’t been revealed yet, there’s no surprise where the story’s heading soon in terms of Sofia’s relation to the whole narrative.

Still, at its nascent stage, the story in Nibah offers nothing new yet and at times, is gruelingly on-the-face. However, given that most of the Pakistani television plays do pick up speed and relevance after a first few episodes, we’ll keep our hopes up!

Check out the first episode of Nibah and tell us what you think:

 

Shahjehan Saleem

The author is Contributing Editor at Something Haute as well as a professor in the Media Sciences department at SZABIST, Karachi. Socio-cultural theories and geography fill up the rest of his time.