Once again, a young girl ends her life. And a young man gets the brunt of it. By a strange coincidence, Jiah Khan who hanged herself to death in a Juhu apartment, was actually christened Nafisa. Ramu changed it when he cast her opposite Amitabh Bachchan in Nishabd. Like Nafisa Joseph, the model who committed suicide a few years ago, leaving her fiancé to the mercy of endless hours with the police, this Nafisa too has gone away, leaving a sweet young boy called Suraj Pancholi to face the music.

And so, once again, we must ask, why must the person left behind be treated like the perpetrator of a crime? Don’t couples fight and doesn’t a boyfriend/fiancé have the right to walk out of a relationship if he is uncomfortable with it? Sadly, in most of these cases, the suicide victim is often someone who is emotionally or mentally fragile, given to mood swings and neurotic behaviour. Isn’t a young man in such a situation within his rights to end a relationship if he has misgivings about going ahead with it?

In the case of Jiah Khan, Suraj Pancholi hadn’t even ended the relationship -— he had merely said he couldn’t meet her that evening. One must remember that he is barely 21 years old and he was seeing a girl older than him. In the unfortunate suicide of Jiah Khan, my heart actually goes out to Suraj’s mom, the silent Zarina Wahab, a successful, well-liked heroine in her time (the 1970s).

Zarina too is several years older than her husband Aditya (real name, Nirmal). And God knows that she has had her hands full ever since she married him. “When you marry a good-looking younger man, you have to be prepared for him to stray outside the fold,” she had philosophised, as she watched Aditya’s shenanigans. Aditya had altercations even with cops. It has been a classic case of booze, babes and brawls, all of which Zarina has faced with stoic acceptance.

“Nirmal is a very good father to the kids,” she had once analysed. “He is a good provider, has given us a beautiful house to stay in, we live very comfortably. I have a lot of freedom in this marriage to go wherever I want and do whatever work I want to do. He is a good husband too, never mind what he does outside the house.”

Zarina bought herself an apartment in Hyderabad some years ago (she is from Andhra Pradesh) and often zips down for a break from routine. On his part, irrespective of how feminists may view it, Aditya and Zarina have remained a couple, providing a stable home for their two children.

As a mother too, Zarina has weathered many a storm. She watched her daughter, Sana, get a break in Suneel Darshan’s Shakalaka Boom Boom, and found her returning home even before the first shooting schedule was over. Worse, Aditya’s ex-girlfriend, Kangana, replaced his daughter in the film!

When Shobhaa Dé runs down Suraj as the proverbial son of bad boy Aditya Pancholi, she does injustice to the 21-year-old. Has she even met the boy to pass such a remark on him when he is actually a very nice young boy? Does Jiah’s tragic end warrant anybody suddenly deifying her as a hapless victim? The truth is, Jiah was never a very popular girl. She kept to herself, had few friends here or in London and her mother’s many men didn’t exactly give her emotional stability. At one time, because of Rabiya’s proximity to Tahir Hussain, there was even a whisper that Jiah could just be Aamir Khan’s half-sister. By the way, Ali, the older man who is supposed to have given Jiah the apartment she died in, was not her friend at all. He was her mother Rabiya Amin’s friend and he had gifted it to her, not to her daughter.

For anybody who wants to know how Zarina is coping with the new emotional crisis in her life, she is having a tough time since she’s facing the camera right now. She is acting in a TV serial for Doordarshan and has been fulfilling her professional commitment even though her mind and heart are far away with her son.

This “older-than-her-husband” woman has coped splendidly with all the blows that life has dealt her. Zarina is positively sunny, always smiling at life’s many bounties (her children, her husband included), instead of letting frustration eat her away. Unfortunately, the “older-than-her-boyfriend” Jiah Khan wasn’t made of the same courageous stuff. RIP Jiah.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is editor, The Film Street Journal