THE WEEK THAT WAS

Tum Larrkay Bhi Naa | Hum TV, Daily 7.00pm

A contemporary script from the king of social satire, Faseeh Bari Khan, Tum Larrkay Bhi Naa explores the lives of two generations.

Faiza Hasan and Vaneeza Ahmed play two sisters with strikingly different personalities and parenting styles, while their children lead parallel lives under their noses, and navigate break-ups and make-ups. At the centre of the serial are Badrika (Aina Asif) and Zoyan (Ali Dayan), whose love life cannot run smoothly due to the latter’s immaturity.

Khan is known for writing about strong women who follow their whims and earn their way, unlike the traditional, dependent ‘good girl’ clichés we usually see on screens, and this drama is no exception. In contrast, all the men are weak and ineffectual, while the younger generation lacks ambition and is only interested in their love lives. Furthermore, there is a lot of subtle humour and plenty of quiet digs at the drama industry in the drama, which regular viewers of Pakistani serials will pick up on. Yasir Nawaz’s direction keeps the show moving at a brisk pace, and the serial showcases a lot of great talent from the younger cast.

Ishq Mein Tere Sadqay | Geo TV, Daily 9.00pm

Zulfikar Shah’s (Muneeb Butt) obsession with Noor (Anika Zulfikar) results in her being an easy target for her enemies, who begin to question her moral character. In the meantime, Salar (Ali Abbas), who was forced to marry her, finally breaks off their on-paper relationship.

After she is humiliated by Salar’s new wife, Noor runs away to avoid pain and constant rejections, only to be found by the stalkerish Zulfikar. When her aunt, her only protector, realises Noor can never be safe at her home, she pushes Noor to marry Zulfikar, who promises to always protect and honour the orphaned Noor. However, life is never easy for this Cinderella, and she faces rejection yet again, this time from Zulfikar’s scheming father, a corrupt businessman.

This masala-style soap serial is a big hit and bucks the trend of family comedies and clean-cut romances that are usually aired — and do well — during Ramazan.

Despite the melodrama, black-and-white characterisations and clichés, the script has an ethical compass that highlights the hero’s extreme behaviour. Noor may be poor and “mazloom” [helpless], but even she stands her ground against the man who forced her into marriage. Muneeb Butt and Anika Zulfikar make an unlikely couple but have won over many viewers.

Fasaana Mart Ka | Green Entertainment, Fri-Sun 9.00pm

Despite a reasonable script and some entertaining performances, this series has failed to catch the eye of the masses, because of the almost depressing focus on its sponsors.

The story centres on a group of retail employees at an Imtiaz Supermarket outlet in Karachi; the glaring artificial lighting and the fact that almost all the action is confined to the store feel claustrophobic. Aena Khan and Shuja Asad make a cute couple, and the quiet longing between the older pair of Faryal Mehmood and Omair Rana is endearing. What is missing are the domestic and personal lives of the staff that Pakistani audiences are used to.

The direction, pace of the show and the whole concept are too slow to create any attachment among viewers, especially during the busy Ramazan season. However, there are strong chances that fans of Korean-style dramas (which often focus exclusively on the protagonists’ professional lives) will tune in.

What To Watch Out For (Or Not)

Sirf Shabana | Hum TV, Coming soon

A thought-provoking new series from the pen of Sanam Mehdi, directed by Aabis Raza, tells the story of a young woman who survives without her father, who abandoned her. The serial features Sohai Ali Abro and Durrab Khalil as a poet.

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 15th, 2026

Frankenstein’s female creature, also known as “the Bride”, was the first female monster to appear on screen, in the 1935 Frankenstein sequel The Bride of Frankenstein. An unruly and rebellious figure, she has inspired dozens of adaptations since.

Most recently, the Bride, as a dramatic character, has been part of a series of creative reimaginings through an explicitly feminist lens. For instance, the dark coming-of-age comedy, Lisa Frankenstein (2024). It imagined the Bride (Kathryn Newton) in the role of the scientist who accidentally brings to life a young Victorian man (Cole Sprouse).

Released just a year earlier, Poor Things (2023) brought an even more complex exploration of power, agency and consent, set in a retro-futuristic Victorian era. In it, the female creature Bella (Emma Stone) negotiates what it means to be both a scientific object and creator (being created out of the pregnant body of a woman and the brain of the mother’s unborn baby). Bella does not abide by the rules and conventions of polite society, using her body against the purpose of her creator and causing several mental breakdowns for the male characters in the process.

Now, a new movie directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Bride!, brings the character to life in moody 1930s Chicago. Jessie Buckley plays the female creature brought back from the dead to be Frankenstein’s mate. But she is not the sort of creature that is inclined to serve someone else’s purpose. When Frankenstein (now the monster, not the scientist, and played by Christian Bale) calls her “the Bride of Frankenstein”, she replies: “No, just the Bride.”

A brief cinematic history of Frankenstein’s Bride as a feminist icon

Although the film promises a ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ story — two lovers and rebels on the run from the law — this Bride refuses to belong to any man. Instead, gun in hand, she demands to be seen and heard on her own terms.

Reanimating the Bride from novel to screen

Since her inception, the Bride’s struggle has been for autonomy. She first appeared in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), named after an egomaniac scientist who creates a creature from cadavers. In the novel, Dr Frankenstein begrudgingly agrees to make his male creature a companion, but destroys her before she can live. He is afraid she might reproduce or become even more powerful than the male creature.

Her destruction is the most violent episode in the novel and makes apparent the anxiety that her unruly female body causes to the mad scientist. The erasure of Shelley’s original female creation set the scene for the way she continues to be written out of most adaptations of the novel. This includes, most recently, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025).

One hundred years on from Shelley’s novel, the Bride was finally brought to life in James Whales’ The Bride of Frankenstein and played by Elsa Lanchester. Although central to the film’s title, she appears only in the final five minutes. But that was more than enough time to establish her cinematic legacy.

She stands tall, dressed in a white gown, her dark, voluminous hair streaked with lightning. Scars and stitches run around her face. She is both alive and dead, a bride and child, beautiful and monstrous, futuristic and otherworldly. Her appearance defies categorisation, not quite the demure wife she is meant to be.

Even more memorable is the Bride’s defiant scream when she rejects the male creature and the role assigned to her by the film’s title and her creator. Feminist scholars have read this as an assertion of sexual autonomy and agency, a rejection of patriarchal control and a refusal of the role of wife and mother.

She is a powerful symbol of defiance, and both costume and voice become tools for future Brides to say no to their fate. Lanchester’s Bride, however, is not able to invent alternative possibilities for herself and is ultimately destroyed by the male creature, punished for her rebellion.

The limitations of patriarchy are made even clearer in later adaptations, in which Brides choose to end their lives, such as in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967). Her limited options also show the constraints of a narrative in which she is made a mere character in someone else’s story.

The creature Lily (Billie Piper) in the television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) is another Bride who attempts to make her own path. But the memories of her body’s previous life as a sex worker have shown her that the world is rotten to the core — her only solution is to destroy it. Lily chooses destruction over radical change and, while she rejects both Frankenstein and the male creature, the man she does willingly choose ultimately betrays her.

For some Brides, power comes from reclaiming the role of creator. This can be seen in Lisa Frankenstein and Poor Things, but also in an earlier adaptation — the exploitation comedy Frankenhooker (1990). The film ends with the Bride taking revenge on her creator by attaching his head to female body parts.

Poor Things is one of the only films where the Bride is not only invested in radical social change, but also escapes the expectations put on her body as a scientific and sexual object. Bella actively subverts these expectations by repurposing her body as one of personal scientific enquiry. This extends to the way she uses sex. It puts her in a complicated position in relation to exploitation and empowerment, where she is simultaneously both and neither. Instead, her actions sit somewhere on the outside of our current perceptions of both.

As Jessie Buckley’s new Bride graces our screens, she promises to follow in the footsteps of her rebellious predecessors — and a long horror tradition.

The writer is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick in the UK

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 15th, 2026

The mats go down first. Long strips of plastic or matted dastarkhwaans [dining spreads], unrolled across the vacant plot. Then come the boxes — stacked earlier in the afternoon by hands that have been at this for hours — each one packed with dates, water, and a small parcel of food.

Someone is stirring a massive pot of Rooh Afza, the deep red syrup catching the last of the daylight as it bleeds into the water. Nearby, a cloud of fragrant vapour escapes as someone lifts the cloth draped over a deg [cauldron] filled with rice and meat.

People begin to arrive before the call to prayer. A security guard still in uniform. A food-delivery rider with a helmet under his arm. A woman with three children who hang close to her sides, wide-eyed and quiet. A roadside worker, hands still carrying the dust of the day. Beggars who have learned the address. An elderly man who walks slowly and says nothing to anyone. Entire families — grandparents, parents, small children — who settle on to the mats with the ease of people who have done this before, because they have.

By the time the azaan [call to prayer] sounds, there are over 200 people seated, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the moment they may eat.

Pakistan’s charitable instinct during Ramazan is genuine and considerable. For the student collectives, the decade-long volunteers and the organisations that depend on it to survive, the generosity is real. But so is the 11-month gap that follows…

PAYING IT FORWARD

The volunteers handing out the food are from a collective called SindhuNamah.

Abier Kachelo, a third-year student at the Institute of Business Administration, started it in the wake of devastation caused by the 2022 floods, which displaced a third of the country’s population. She was fresh into university at the time and, with her friends’ support, she organised food rations to be sent to flood-affected villages in Sindh.

“In this time, we also learned about malnutrition, stunting and food insecurity, particularly in Sindh,” says Zoya Hemani, Abier’s classmate and an integral part of SindhuNamah. The situation compelled them to increase their efforts, which now include medical drives and school restoration, alongside the daily iftar dastarkhwaan that has run every Ramazan for the past three years.

“When we started, we were a team of no more than 10 students,” Abier tells Eos. “Today, we have over 100 student volunteers in our network.” For funds, they rely on friends and relatives, while they also get unsolicited donations via social media. “We have definitely formed meaningful connections with many of the donors over the years,” she adds.

Zoya points out that they keep donors apprised of how their money is being spent to avoid concerns over transparency. “And there will always be people who will accuse you of ‘chasing clout’, but that is quickly swept away by the kindness you come across,” she continues.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

“Once, instead of the usual 250 people at our dastarkhwaan, more than 500 arrived, just minutes before iftar. We didn’t want to turn anyone away, but we simply didn’t have enough food,” narrates Zoya.

“As our team scrambled to manage the situation, a man we had never seen before suddenly stopped by and dropped off three degs of rice, no questions asked, no words exchanged. In that moment, with minutes to spare before iftar, it felt like everything fell into place exactly when it was needed,” she says. “Running this initiative, we watch our prayers manifest in real time, miracles unfold and doors open in ways we can never fully comprehend.”

SindhuNamah is one expression of an impulse that surfaces across the city every Ramazan. Sadia, 27, found her way into this world the same way many do — through a single social media post, back in 2015. She has since become the linchpin of the dastarkhwaan efforts, returning to managing it without fail every Ramazan.

“If we are privileged enough and have a network, it is our duty to become a source of help or means for the underprivileged communities” she says.

GOING YEAR-ROUND

I am also reminded of a memory from 15 years ago. From the first-floor balcony of my apartment in a middle-class neighbourhood, I would watch a college student set up a small classroom in our building’s compound every evening.

The students were the children of the maids and workers who kept the building running — children with nowhere else to go for structured learning. He brought his own chalk. No one had asked him to come.

Saqlain Shariff is in his late-thirties now. That compound classroom became Kaizen Pakistan, an organisation he co-founded with a friend that today runs a classroom providing education to children from multiple slum communities who would otherwise have none.

Some of those first students are in university. He still works a regular job to keep himself afloat, while managing the organisation through financial shortfalls that recur with a regularity that would have defeated most people long ago.

“We run into trouble every few months,” he says. “Ramazan is when we breathe again.”

AN INTERTWINED HISTORY

While dastarkhwaans are a Ramazan-specific phenomenon, they do serve as the gateway to the wider world of charity and volunteerism. But charity is also very much part of Pakistan’s social fabric, as much due to the religious concepts of zakat [obligatory charity] and sadqa [voluntary charity], as it is due to Partition — the tradition of taking in strangers, of communal obligation to those with nothing, runs deep in a country born from displacement.

Even young Abier and Zoya of SindhuNamah allude to this culture. “Sindh has always celebrated the essence of communal service, through a longstanding tradition of langars [free communal kitchens], musaafir khanas [travellers’ lodges] and dastarkhwaans,” Abier tells Eos. “We couldn’t bear to see these values disintegrate as suffering rises.”

As Sindh and the rest of the country continues to experience various degrees of calamities, including regular floods, such interventions are needed more than ever. The latest global food security report estimates that 60.3 percent of Pakistanis cannot afford a healthy diet, while some 16.5 percent are undernourished.

THE GAP THAT FOLLOWS

The numbers make the case for why efforts like SindhuNamah’s matter — but they also expose the limits of what any dastarkhwaan can do. Major charities suggest that roughly 80 percent of annual donations collected by them arrive during Ramazan alone. For smaller organisations, the proportion is often higher. The generosity is real. So is the 11-month gap that follows.

This is the tension that sits beneath the warmth of every dastarkhwaan. Pakistan’s charitable instinct during Ramazan is genuine and considerable — but it is also concentrated, compressed into 30 days and then largely withdrawn. Donor fatigue sets in quickly once the month ends.

Saqlain feels it every year, the particular quiet of the post-Ramazan weeks when the messages slow and the accounts thin. SindhuNamah feels it too, Zoya acknowledges — the bulk of their operations are carried out during this month precisely because sustaining donor attention beyond it is difficult. “The need doesn’t stop,” she says. “But the giving does.”

Back on the vacant plot, the azaan has sounded. Two hundred people reach for dates at the same moment — the quiet collective exhale of a fast being broken. The Rooh Afza moves along the mats in jugs. Children who arrived silent are now animated, reaching across their parents. The elderly man who said nothing to anyone is being served by a volunteer crouching beside him, unhurried.

There is enough food tonight. There is, for now, enough of everything.

The writer is a member of staff

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 15th, 2026