Abhimanyu In ‘Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba’ Character Explained

Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba is filled with characters that are morally flawed. Their actions will leave you scratching your head. Their justifications might not be right, but it proves that there are men and women who do what they think is right for them and deal with the consequences later. Just like in the first film, Haseen Dillruba, everyone makes mistakes and deals with the aftermath of the actions they took for a few hours of gratification. One such character in the sequel is Abhimanyu, who is head over heels in love with Rani Kashyap, a woman he saw at the dispensary and has never been able to keep out of his mind since. He finds ways to run into her or have a glance at her in the hope she will notice his gaze. To him, Rani was a widow, as she had said to everyone she had met in Agra. This made the fondness he had for her guilt-free. Abhimanyu does give stalker vibes, for he shows up at her place of work and seems to live day to day just hoping to see her and converse with her. 

Abhimanyu has a sad history, as he lost his parents and later his uncle and his family, rendering him orphaned for the past many years. This is an added advantage, as he wouldn’t have anyone from the family objecting to him marrying a widow, as there is still a lot of taboo concerning that subject. Abhimanyu was shocked and relieved when Rani walked up to him and proposed the idea of marrying without any courtship. This was probably the best day in his life, as he was marrying the woman he dreamed of for so long and agreed to the nuptials without having a second thought about it. He never did any background check on her because he trusted her wholeheartedly, and that became a problem later in his love story.

Abhimanyu believed in consent, which was why he never touched his newlywed wife, as she claimed to still be recovering from the death of her first husband. He initially comes across as an understanding husband who goes out of his way to keep Rani company, all while she was running around making plans with her real husband Rishu to abscond at the right time. The man had his heart broken on learning what his wife was up to, and things were different from that point on. Abhimanyu however claimed he wanted Rani to come to him on her own as he would never force her to do so. This is the mind game he was playing with the couple, all while setting up things to go his way eventually.

Abhimanyu did not take this betrayal lightly, as he was deeply in love with Rani, which made him confess his role in murdering his uncle and their family, who financially swindled his parents. This indicates that Abhimanyu was a sensitive man who was triggered by his childhood trauma of having lost his parents to betrayal. He never healed from it, which made him kill his own family members. Since Abhimanyu cold bloodedly murdered his extended family, he figured he could do it again as it came easy to him, and he figured this was the only solution. He wanted to eliminate people for convenience’s sake, and since no one suspected him before, he figured he could repeat his actions. Abhimanyu, however, underestimated Rani and Rishu, the love they harbored, and the lengths  to which they would go to be together and live a normal married life. Abhimanyu had hoped to get Rani to his side, but he did not comprehend the fact that Rani never intended to live with him. 

Abhimanyu was too arrogant at this point, when he moved to Deosar in Himachal Pradesh with Rabi after losing Rishu to a crocodile attack; he did not expect Rani to checkmate him by jumping off the cliff, not before confessing to having seen him killing her husband. Abhimanyu was just accused of killing Rishu, but he was also found to have killed a snake charmer and Poonam, who was blackmailing Rishu all the while. As mentioned above, any person he felt was a liability and of no use to him, he made sure to get rid of in the most gruesome fashion. He killed his uncle’s family with snake purchased from the snake charmer, whom he killed as well. Since Poonam, the seductress, had come too close to the plan Rishu, Rani, and Abhimanyu had; he had to get rid of her too. Abhimanyu was eventually arrested because all of his crimes came to the forefront thanks to Rani, who trapped him by revealing what happened in reality, which Abhimanyu never denied, which was as good as an admission of guilt. The police were quick to arrest him. Odds were against him as he got caught, but he was smart enough to conclude that Rani and Rishu were alive, which was why the police never found the bodies of either of them. Abhimanyu may have been smug, but he was not wrong, as he’d got to know a lot about the couple in his brief interaction with them and from the love Rani had for Dinesh Pandit’s books.

Abhimanyu initially claimed to have been a fan of Dinesh Pandit’s books just because he had seen Rani reading them. He confessed to be the son of the author, Dinesh Pandit, Rani keeps quoting from. This indicates all the vicious plans to kill people may have come from the pulpy novels his father wrote all these years. Those books were a perfect example of what many call a crime of passion, and using those as his source, Abhimanyu would come back stronger and seek the couple that trapped him.