Day Two

It is the night of vigil. Long, unending and burdensome. Four of us have decided to take turns and sit up, watching over him. An earthen lamp lies towards his head, burning. Every half an hour or so, ghee will have to be poured into it, and its wick trimmed, to keep the flame alive. And every few hours, the ice slabs will have to be changed to prevent the body from putrefying. The days’ events have left everyone spinning around, circles of grief and exhaustion widening. Fighting rather hard to keep my eyes wide open, I’m wondering what it is that is being protected now. Only a few months ago, when I visited him the last time, I had found him particularly sullen and withdrawn. ‘Of late, he has become a little incommunicative,’ is how mother had put it, cryptically. Late into the night, he would sit up, poring over the account books, making calculations that none of us could ever figure out. During the day, he would simply make himself scarce, returning home only late in the evenings. Then too, rather than join the rest of us, he would prefer to park his cane-chair out in the garden in front of the house, and sit there for hours on end, his head buried among his hands. Very rarely would he lift his head up, and when he did, his eyes would shut involuntarily as head rolled over the back of his chair, reclining. Often, sitting in this posture, he used to stare vacantly at the summer sky, perhaps watching it change colours from orange to crimson to deep red, purple and then inky blue. Such were the moments when he didn’t want anyone, not even his granddaughters whom he loved to distraction, to disturb him. One day, finding him sitting in the garden by himself, I had walked across to him and said, “Something seems to be playing on your mind. Why don’t you share it? For all you know, it just might help.” He had looked at me as if I was a rank stranger, doubt and suspicion lurking in his eyes. And then, after what appeared to be a great effort, he spoke haltingly, “This is something you won’t understand...There comes a stage in life, when you have nothing to do…nothing to look back...or forward to....And that’s when you become what I have…a watchman.” Despite the evening shadows thickening around him, I had been able to detect a sudden flash of light in his weary eyes. Years ago, when Hemant was still a college student, he had made it a habit of returning home late. Every day, it was a new excuse, either an outing with the friends or an extra class or tuition or a game of tennis. Hemant had always been the most outgoing among us all. He spent as little time at home as he could. And when he didn’t have any genuine reason to be away from home, he often found reasons or rather manufactured them. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he had had a particularly troubled childhood. He was born at a time when the family was recovering from the sudden death of one of the young sons in a tragic road accident. Rather than hail his birth as a return of the lost member, something, which, too, could have been done, everyone had begun to believe, for whatever reasons, that his was an inauspicious arrival. Whether or not there was any real basis for such a prejudice, Hemant had definitely grown up under the shadow of being ‘the accursed one,’ a sobriquet he had earned much before he was given a proper name. As a child, he used to be extremely violent, so much so, that the moment he was denied anything he demanded, he would start banging the doors. Once in school, he had lifted a stool to hit his class teacher who had pulled him up for wearing chappals and not his regular school shoes. And now in college, he had found other, more subtle ways of retaliation, returning home late being the most conspicuous of them all. It had become almost a daily affair. In winters, it used to be dark by eight in the evening. Everyday, around this time, father would position himself in the window, waiting for Hemant to return. Silhouetted against the dim light of the room, he would stand for hours together, his eyes searching desperately through the darkness. With the clock ticking away silently, he would start pacing up and down the room, occasionally peering out of the window. Once, while he waited, his anxiety mounting to a pitch, a police jeep had pulled outside the main gate. Two policemen got off the jeep and came towards the house, walking up the stairs. They hadn’t even laid their fingers upon the bell when he threw the door open. After making a few preliminary enquiries, they had told him how Hemant had been arrested on the charge of eve-teasing. Hemant had spent the night in the lock-up, and father had stayed wide-awake, worrying over his fate. 

The thick ice slabs are beginning to melt, running into little rivulets across the floor. As the cold water hits against the skin of my soles, I’m startled. With ghee already dried up, the wick has burnt itself out, and is now giving off a foul smell. While pouring ghee in the earthen lamp, I look around, guiltily, wondering if anyone has seen the extinguishing of the lamp. 

An oval-shaped lake lay at the bottom, with a thick, wooded forest surrounding it. Guarding the expanse of water stood tall tress of deodar and pine, lining up the hills receding from the view, ablaze in the summer sun. Only the tip of the frozen peaks was visible, peering from somewhere close to the sky. Sitting on the edge of the lake, I was casting pebbles into water, watching the ripples break into ever widening circles, dissolving into nothingness. Today, again, the postman had come and gone, without bringing us the money order we had long been waiting for. Only last night, the hotel manager had sent a word across that if we wanted to prolong our stay, we must deposit some more money as an advance. All our efforts to contact father on the phone had proved to be abortive. Each time, we called him up, it so happened that he wasn’t home. It was intriguing, this silence on his part, for he usually did make an effort to get in touch, every second day or so. But now for the past ten days, there had been no news from him. We had begun to worry, not so much for him as ourselves. The money was running out fast. And we were stranded here in this strange place, unable to pay the bills. Mother’s condition had only made the matters a shade worse. Of late, she had been complaining of acute acidity, which often brought on, rather unexpectedly, these sudden attacks of asthma, too. Unconcerned, Hemant would go off with his friends, either for a game of billiards or horse riding, leaving Anurag and me to manage the situation. The local doctor hadn’t been able to figure out what really was wrong with her but her condition was worsening by the day. That’s when I found myself, perhaps the first time ever, wondering if I shouldn’t have hastened to pick up a job and be financially independent. Though I had already finished my masters, I hadn’t shown any urgency in looking for a job. I had plans to continue my studies, go abroad and do a doctoral degree in literature. For someone who had chosen to live in the world of books, the demands of commerce and money appeared not only futile, but also demeaning. Now as I sat by the lake, casting pebbles into its depths, the futility of my dreams had suddenly been driven home to me. Finally the money order did arrive, but only after a fortnight or so. The very same day, Anurag and I decided to pack up the bags and leave. Though Hemant was in no mood to leave, wanting to spend another week or so, our immediate worry was that we should get mother home, somehow. The day we decided to leave, we weren’t sure if we were bound for Amritsar or elsewhere. During the journey, mother’s condition deteriorated, suddenly. Going to Amritsar would have meant a gruelling twelve hours or more. So midway across, we had got off our Amritsar-bound bus, and boarded the one heading towards Delhi, no more than seven hours away. Right through the journey, mother had kept groaning with pain, complaining of constant burning sensation in her stomach, and throwing up, intermittently. It was so bad that she couldn’t even digest a glass of plain water. It was just touch and go, something the doctors also confirmed later when she was hospitalised. They said, had there been a few hours’ delay in bringing her to the hospital, she probably wouldn’t have survived. Slipping out of her kidney, the stones had travelled close to her heart and now lay lodged there, threatening her.

Accompanied by friends, Hemant was walking through the forest. The soil under their feet was damp and slippery, as it had been raining incessantly through the night. Holding on to each other for support, they were walking rather gingerly, wading through a wild overgrowth, balancing their feet upon the rugged rocks that lay perilously jutting out. One wrong step and all of them would have gone hurtling through the abyss, below which stood the lake, its giant-sized mouth, gyrating. In a sudden burst of recklessness, quietly slipping his own hands out of his friends’, Hemant decided to press on ahead. He had developed this sudden desire to outstrip his friends, leaving them far behind. Holding on to the roots and the branches firmly, he advanced slowly, clearing his path through the dense forest. Soon enough, he was taking long strides, unmindful of the precipitous heights.  Moving on ahead, he didn’t turn back even once to see how far behind he had left his friends. Now, he was enjoying the cool forest wind against his face; its chill had a certain solace about it. He had hardly walked a hundred yards or so, when his hand fell upon a mulberry bush. Unable to realise that if he hung on to it for support, it just might get uprooted a little too easily, he had done precisely that. And the very next moment, he was skidding off the hill, down towards the lake. Once or twice, he made a bid to clutch on to the wild bushes, but that didn’t stop his descent in anyway. The shoots kept slipping out of his hold, hastening his fall. That moment, when he had given up all hope of returning home alive, something of a miracle happened. He felt as though someone had suddenly got hold of his hands and was now pulling him up with great force. And the very next moment, his feet had landed upon a firm rock, jutting out. Suspended in mid-air, he had stood, waiting for the help to arrive, which came only after two hours or more. Having lost his track, his friends had branched off in a different direction, altogether. Echoing through the forest, all his cries for help had returned, crashing against him. Finally, on finding him stranded upon the rock, they had immediately lowered a rope for support. By the time he was hauled up, he was so exhausted that he nearly collapsed.          

Hemant has been sitting by my side, for close to two hours now. But we haven’t exchanged a single word. Occasionally, he looks at me, as though rattled by a sudden pain, and then looks away. His hurtful look has always had an unsettling effect on me. Over the years, it has become familiar, but not any the less unnerving. It all started with that Diwali gift, lying frozen somewhere in the memory. Though we used to be rather hard up those days, grandfather would still insist on buying us gifts, howsoever small. Often while going out to buy them, he would go alone, refusing to take any one of us along. Somehow he had this feeling that, being a true patriarch he could always sense the needs of each and every member of the family, right from the eldest to the youngest. He had his own imperious manner of announcing these special gifts, too. In the evening, he would hold his private darbar to which we were all summoned, one by one, and given the prize. We had instructions from the father to accept whatever was given with gratitude and, certainly, without a demur. That year, he had decided to buy both Hemant and me, cloth material for the school dress, we had been demanding for some time. When I went in to collect my prize, he told me, conspiratorially, that I mustn’t show it to Hemant as mine was more expensive than his. Chafing at the injustice of it all, I had come away, wondering, if it was right on my part to become a party to the crime I had no intentions of committing. As soon as Hemant stepped out, holding his gift in hand, disappointment was all over his face. Before going in, he had already felt my cloth between his fingers and instinctively knew that his coarse-grained, rugged one was no match to mine, which not only had a soft feel but also a rich texture. That moment, he had looked up at me, accusingly, as though I had betrayed him in some way he hadn’t been able to explain. And now, it’s this feeling of hurt and betrayal that often shines through his eyes, especially when he looks at me, in his off-guarded moments. Across the years, his look hasn’t lost its power to disturb me. 

Dawn is still a few hours away, and I can see Anurag walking in to relieve Hemant. He takes his position up against the wall, and sits with his legs folded up in the front, his head resting over his knees. He has lost that sparkle in the eyes he was born with. While expecting him, mother was confident that she wouldn’t beget another son, but rather proving to be third time lucky, be blessed with a daughter. Earlier on two occasions, she had prayed quite desperately for a daughter, but apparently, to no avail. Though she wasn’t much of a believer in idol worship, retiring to the puja room, she would often sit there for hours together, staring at the mischievous, kohl-lined eyes of Krishna, whose idol was the centrepiece. Anurag was born with large, impish eyes, and upturned, curvaceous eyelashes, almost feminine in their appeal, which sometimes misled people about his sex, when he was still an infant. As he grew up, he would chase mother in and out of the kitchen, run errands for her and even help her with cooking whenever he could. Food is something he loved to eat, and cooking is what gave him the utmost pleasure. Once as a teenager, he had surprised all of us with his doughnuts, which no one in the family knew the recipe of. His culinary skills were something the family often spoke of either with pride or with sarcasm or with both thrown in for good measure. He must have been around seven or eight when Biro, a young girl of twelve, was hired to work in the kitchen. Daughter of a former employee of the factory, she would spend most of her time playing with Hemant and Anurag. Occasionally, she was expected to give Anurag a good scrubbed bath as well, especially when mother would either be busy in the kitchen or in bed, recovering from a bad attack of asthma. One day, in summer, he wasn’t to be seen anywhere in the evenings. For quite sometime, it didn’t even occur to any of us that we ought to be looking for him. Everyone presumed that he must be out in the fields, playing and would eventually return on his own. But when he didn’t until eight, we had gone out, searching for him. Hemant had gone as far as the servant quarters, lined up against the boundary wall, right behind the factory, but no, Anurag was not there; he was nowhere. It’s only when the grandfather, quite accidentally, threw the door of the bathroom open that he had found Anurag, lying on the floor, face-down, tap still running. It was the first time, anyone of us woke up to this strange habit he had developed of falling off to sleep, on the bath-floor. It had triggered off all kinds of speculation, grandfather had even tried out his homeo remedies but nothing had really worked. Strangely, he got over this habit only a few years later, when Biro suddenly left the job on the plea that she was to get married. For months on end, this mysterious habit of Anurag had intrigued the family members, only to be forgotten when he grew up into a young boy. Now, years later, as he sits doubled up in a corner, eyeing the flame of the earthen lamp, it rises unsteadily, almost stealthily.         

An interminable procession is pressing on ahead, spilling over into lanes and by-lanes, jostling for space in an overcrowded bazaar as though the juggernaut of Lord Jagannath is rolling out. It is as if each memory is desperate to get its firm hold over the sacred ropes, anxious to fall in line with the movement of the chariot, its huge wheels grinding, slowly but surely. And yet each memory is alone, facing only its own moments of truth or falsehood, fighting only for its own survival. So much gets crushed in this long journey, and so much more is left behind that often we wonder if the journey is really worth the effort put behind it. The ritualistic bath over, he is now being dressed up for the final procession. It has been decided that the official van carrying him will lead the way, private cars and scooters bringing up the rear. The route of the procession has already been worked out to avoid any last minute confusion. I wonder if he would have liked to go on his last journey the way we have planned it out for him. All his life, he had had this incurable distaste for the crowded places, something he had developed rather early on in life. He must have been around twenty-five, when, one evening, he went out on a drive with his friends. As a young man of ample means, it wasn’t unusual for him to be surrounded by a band of friends, who often lived it up at his expense. A spirit of gaiety and abandon was in the air. Huge crowds were milling around in the streets, crawling towards the Dusshera ground, eager to witness the annual ritual of ‘evil’ going up in flames at sunset. He was speeding away as he often did. Suddenly, at the crossing, while giving his Ford car a sharp turn, he had lost balance, swerved to the left and rammed into a family of three, walking on the pavement. The man and the wife had jumped to safety, but the child lay flattened on the pavement, her body spattered with blood. Suddenly, the crowd had split, as people lunged forward towards the victim. His friends had simply got off the car, and disappeared into the crowd. Too stunned to react, he had sat there, unmoved. While he was busy haggling with the police, someone had rushed the child to the hospital. That day, he had taken a vow never to step out of the house on a festival day, a vow he had kept all through his life. Over the years, he had developed this habit of avoiding the milling crowds everywhere, on the road, in the market place or even at home. But now, silent and inert, he’s leading his own procession.    

Walking in through the fields, he is coming, in a white kurta-pyjama, a light brown shawl thrown across his shoulders, his head bowed in distress. Other men and women, all dressed in white, are bringing up the rear, a neat file stretching out. Leaving the cars parked outside the main gate, all of them are now zigzagging through a beaten track that runs diagonally across the field, dragging their feet wearily along. Shading off their faces with bare hands, they are trying to ward off the fury of a July sun beating down hard upon their heads. Though crackling with their own heat, the clouds are moving apace, waiting to burst at the first available opportunity. Standing on the steps of the house and seeing them approach, I wonder, why they haven’t hit the brick-lined road, skirting the vacant lot, choosing instead this short cut through the fields. It’s only when he comes closer do I find that during the past few weeks’ of his absence from home, he has grown thick salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin. As he is without his specs, it’s not too difficult for me to see that his face is already awash with tears. And the very next moment, walking up to me, he throws his arms around my tiny, eight-year old shoulders, and starts crying, inconsolably, almost like a child, repeating again and again, “Oh, Why did it have to happen? Why did God have to do ‘this’ to us?” Hearing his cries it feels as though I’m not his son, but his father, patting his back encouragingly with my tiny hands, which barely reach up to his shoulders. Now, looking back I wonder if Natchiketa can ever return from the Yamloka and talk to his father, Udalayaka about the great significance of death that he doesn’t quite understand himself. 

Ever since he has returned from the cremation of Diwan uncle, father has been unusually distracted. More than his sister’s husband, Diwan uncle has been a friend and a confidante. It was their fascination for beautiful women that often made them sit up through the nights, talking animatedly. During his frequent visits to Amritsar, father and he would take off on a secret mission, all of a sudden in the evenings, leaving the family in a quandary. His sister had somehow convinced herself that her brother was the one responsible for leading her husband into adventures he could have very well done without. Unwilling to believe that her husband was a gullible fool she was quite willing to believe the worst about her own brother. How and when this bad faith developed between the two is something rather difficult to say. But all that has survived from the stories doing the rounds in the family circles is that once both of them had fought a pitched battle over this, so much so that they hadn’t spoken to each other, after that, for more than two years. And now after Diwan uncle’s premature death, when father occasionally slides back into deep depressions, I don’t quite know whether he is mourning the man he has shared his youth with or is mourning the passing away of his own youth. But each time it happens, a pall of gloom descends upon the house, his black moods flaring up into unexpected acts of violence. It was a Sunday morning. Father had repeatedly been telling Hemant to go into his room and study, but he just wouldn’t pay any attention. Suddenly, pulling a compass out of his geometry box, father had thrust it into Hemant’s thigh as he stood, trembling in a corner. Groaning with pain, he had doubled over. One afternoon, mother had stubbornly refused to serve hot chappatis to grandmother in her room, on the plea that she couldn’t handle both cooking and serving at the same time. Refusing to step down from the position she had already struck, grandmother, too, had preferred to go without food. In the evening, on his return from the factory, when the matter was reported to father, he had come charging at mother, intimidating her into a corner. That night, retreating into a dark corner of the storeroom, where I could always sit for hours together, unnoticed, I had cried my heart out. I don’t quite remember what it was that made me burst into muffled tears, the fate of my brother or the humiliation of my mother. All I do remember is that I had, secretly, held myself responsible for the entire situation. A few months’ prior to Diwan uncle’s sudden departure, I had begun to think more and more of death. So strong was this feeling that I often entertained this idea of putting an end to life in some unexpected, rather dramatic manner. The more I thought about it, more it appealed to my raw, untrained imagination. It wouldn’t be such a bad idea, after all, to put an abrupt end to life. One rash gesture held out the promise of eternal peace. What better solution could my childish mind come up with, a single stroke would have taken care of just about everything. All at once, it would have spared me the agony of having to witness father’s unending remorse, mother’s untold humiliation and brother’s bleeding wounds. At seven, if you’re ever compelled to think about death, you only think of it as a fragrant dream that hangs elusively over your private stink, waiting to snuff it out, saving it from spreading outwards. At seven, it appears to you that even if you were to think of death in relation to yourself, you could actually make it happen to someone else within the family. It is as if your secret thoughts have this mysterious power of being heard by God, who, in retaliation, immediately sends the messengers of Yama down upon the earth, to claim some member of the family everyone has so dearly loved. On Diwan uncle’s death, it was really strange how father had experienced all the grief, while I had been left reeling under loads and loads of guilt for having caused it, quite unwittingly. 

Waves of grief and depression are rippling through the house, once again, now that having been consigned to the flames already, he has become indistinguishable from the elements. Gautam is distracted in much the same manner as father had been, several years ago. Being the youngest in the family, he definitely did get to spend with him, the longest spell anyone of us could claim to. He was the only one at home when father suddenly collapsed into a heap; and it was just yesterday morning. Bewildered, he had rushed him from one doctor to another, from one hospital to another, hoping that someone would be able to work the miracle; that someone would bring him back from the land of the dead. It was his incredulity, his total disbelief, his refusal to accept that the inevitable had happened; that we had found the hardest to manage. Even when the funeral bier was being prepared, he kept saying, “Don’t take him away. Do something if you can. No, he’s not dead. Don’t you see beads of sweat shining on his forehead? Now, how can that be, if he’s already dead? No, the doctors have made some mistake…” Unable to fantasise about death at thirty-five now, I’m at a loss to understand how my words can pierce through his pain, offering some diversion by way of consolation. Inconsolable, he walks into father’s room, bolting the door from inside. From across the door, only muffled sounds of his cries are occasionally heard. Positioned outside the door, as we wait for him to materialise, a distant memory knocks all of a sudden, and my heart starts thumping, ever so loudly. Once, father had had a tiff with his parents, something he had refused to talk to us about. In a fit of rage, he had simply locked himself inside the room, threatening to kill himself. Standing outside, I was imagining how, soon enough, a key would turn into his closet, throwing it open with a screech. And before I even get myself to react, he’d probably do the next possible thing he could, which was to lay his hands upon a six-bore, licensed gun he always kept in his personal closet and perhaps shoot himself dead. Having been a witness to this frightening scene a number of times in my childhood, I could’ve predicted its well-rehearsed quality, down to the last detail. The gun is still very much inside father’s closet. What if Gautam decides to execute the threat that father had never used as anything more than a pretext to let off his steam! And the next moment, I’m beating at the door, hard, urging Gautam to throw it open. Hemant and Anurag are also trying out whatever strategy they can, from mild persuasion to wild intimidation, but nothing seems to be working with him, right now. He appears to have crossed that frontier of grief, which makes grief what it is, a manageable human experience, something to be assuaged, and not entirely beyond the pale of redemption. For Gautam, who stands outside the range of mere human grief, it appears to have become the single most important reason for being alive, something that holds out a dangerous prospect of splitting his innards. After about two hours or more, when he finally does open the door, he appears relatively calm and composed. But in a bid to reach out across, the moment we inch close to him, violently jerking off our hold, he snarls flames of hatred blazing in his eyes, “O you bloody bastards. Get lost, I don’t want to see the faces of anyone of you. You’re the real murderers. You’ve killed my father. Yes, you’ve killed him.” Years later, today, once again, I can see that seven-year-old, lying curled up inside a dark storeroom, shedding silent tears, but this time round, I don’t hear his muffled screams, at all.

The factory siren has already been sounded, its shrillness crashing upon the ears. The workers are swirling around in a tizzy, switching off the machines, putting away the gunny sacks full of unused yarn, eager to wind up their night shift and rush back home. Lined up next to the supervisor, some are busy loading into the scales the yarn they have spun through the night, while others, having weighed it already, are heading towards the store room, where it would ultimately be deposited. Only after everything has been accounted for and the stock registers put in order would they be able to get the supervisor’s permission to leave. And now, filing up near the main gate, they are waiting for the timekeeper to punch their cards. Much before the next shift begins, in about half an hour or so, everyone would have left, including the supervisor. Chet Ram, the watchman, is pacing up and down the road, watching the workers shuffle towards the cycle-shed, eager that they clear off. For soon enough, he would pull the shutters down and proceed home, after having locked in the main gate. Sarup Singh, the other watchman, would soon be back on his morning duty, and it is for him to oversee the start of the next shift. Like other days, Chet Ram ambles across to the shutter, in a bid to pull it down, marking the end of the night shift. He has barely put his hand on the clasp, and is still preparing to pull it down when the shutter comes crashing upon his head. Lying flattened on the ground, he’s been reduced to a mangled heap of flesh, his screams buried under the weight of the shutter. It’s only when Sarup Singh comes, half an hour later that he discovers how Chet Ram died in an accident. Rushing off towards the kothi, he goes and informs the sahibs about it. If I were to say that this incident happened much before I was born, you’d probably begin to doubt the very credibility of the entire story. For instance, you’re bound to question how and in what manner did I really learn of this incident, if it’s not something I have either seen or heard. In whatever I have told you so far, I may have somehow succeeded in creating this impression that what you’re reading is not outside the range of things seen or heard, yet it doesn’t always happen so. After all, Natchiketa doesn’t always have to know the shashtras to be able to question the meanness of what his father regarded as an act of charity. Well, as far as this incident goes, all I can say is that it has been handed down from one generation of workers to another. By the time I grew up into a young lad, it had already passed into some kind of a folk-tale, which workers told each other in hushed tones, occasionally, over lunch. But one thing that they scrupulously avoided to mention was as to what really happened to Chet Ram’s family, perhaps because they didn’t know it, or could it be that they didn’t want to talk about it.           

              

                 

      *                                         *                                         *                                        * 

DAY ONE

Sitting crouched in a white Maruti van, five of us are heading towards Amritsar. A pall of silence hangs inside, separating us. The van is racing on ahead, as though involuntarily, very much like an unregulated life winding down the path of destiny. A dark, tarmac road lies ahead, stretching out like the unending hours of grief. With one milestone blowing into another, the trees are falling in and out of view like long-forgotten, distant memories. Appalled at the prospect of going to school in my worn-out, over-repaired shoes, as a twelve-year-old, I had, once, presented him with a sudden demand for a new pair. Of my secret childhood fascination with shoes, he was least aware. He hadn’t the faintest of notions of how I spent hours together polishing my shoes every evening. Polishing shoes and combing hair were the only two obsessions I had. It was simply unthinkable for me to go to school wearing leather chappals, something he had suggested merely to put me off. It was almost like asking me to step out of the house, with my hair all crumpled. But he had no patience for my pleas. Dismissing them all with an inflexible ‘no,’ he had walked out of the house in a huff, shutting the door behind. Though I was known to be quite a docile child, a sudden frenzy had overtaken me. Rushing towards the main door and finding it bolted from outside, I had simply shot my hand through the glass pane. Crashing into a splintered heap around my feet, it had left a deep gnash on my left wrist, which had taken several days to heal. The sudden stab of pain, I had felt then, was still fresh in my mind. As fresh perhaps as was the unexpected, secret joy I had experienced years later, when dragging me to the market, he had compelled me to pick up an expensive suit length for myself, something I didn’t really have any felt need for. In his characteristic style, he had announced his intention of having made up his mind to gift me a suit length the day I was awarded a doctoral degree. Now, I wasn’t a child of twelve any longer. Well past my thirty-two years, I was already a much-married man with two little children of my own. For me, it was only natural to have reservations about accepting an offer of such an expensive gift from him. But I knew the futility of resisting him just as well. He had made it abundantly clear, he wouldn’t take a ‘no’ for an answer, only allow me a choice of colour. This time round, there was no need for me to bang my hand into the glass pane. Unmindful of my weak protestations, he had simply gone ahead and bought me something I could have very well done without.

Such a man was he, one who always spoke very little, his actions speaking louder than his words. Though he always chose his moment, even manner of action, he never felt troubled by any special need to find reasons for his actions or deeds. Even if he did find the reasons, the urge to share them with others was not necessarily the strongest of all the urges he had. His reasons always lay deep inside his heart, wrapped in impenetrable silence. Looking out of the window now as I sit holding the back of the front seat, suddenly his face is hovering before my bleary eyes. Broad forehead, well cut, chiselled features, aquiline nose, a strong, angular jawbone and thin, white hair, blown back. Everything was just the way I had seen it, the last time, except that the dark circles around the eyes have darkened and the cheeks have cut hollows much deeper. Seeing the dark circles and sunken hollows, I burst into a sudden cry, “Oh! Why did it have to happen?” And each time my wife hears me repeat this, her hand reaches out mine, reassuringly, resting upon it awhile, withdrawing slowly, her eyes still moist. Once in a while, when I burst into uncontrollable, hysterical sobs, Anurag, who is sitting in the front, next to the driver, reminds me, without so much as turning around, “Get hold of yourself. You should think of mother. Right now, we need only think of her.” Amazing that even in this moment, when we are heading to participate in his last rites, Anurag is refusing to think of father. His thoughts have always been for mother; right from his early days, he has felt a strong, irresistible pull towards her. Even as a child of ten, he often used to sell stickers in school to be able to make little money so as to buy mother sugarcane slivers she loved to eat. Mother hadn’t been keeping too well. She would stay up nights; persistent, asthmatic cough and loud, rasping breath racking her whole being. As she had to take a heavy dose of medicines, she had developed a craving for sugar-cane slivers. She rarely ever had any money she could either call her own or spend the way she wished. All four of us knew this, but only Anurag had the ingenuity to help mother through. Only he had the better sense to intuit little needs of mother, which often went unexpressed, also unattended. Once he had even fought with father for his refusal to provide pin money to mother. Anurag had learnt to play the provider much before he actually became one.

As my thoughts begin to wander off, I twist around to look at the faces of my daughters, who are sitting huddled together, holding on to my wife for support. Fear lurking in their large, innocent eyes, they are looking at their mother’s face, bewildered. Too young to understand the significance of what has transpired! How can I tell them what it is to lose him when I don’t quite know the real nature of the loss myself? The only thought that is returning somewhat insistently to me now is that I’d never be able to use the word ‘Papa’ ever again. It is as if this word has slipped out of my ‘dictionary’ forever, unseen and unnoticed. Now it exists only as a noun, not as person for me. Often, the loss of a dear one is experienced in or through language much before it becomes a real, material fact or is experienced as an actual event. And this is something my daughters can’t be expected to grasp even if I try hard enough to explain, which I don’t quite feel up to, anyway.

The van jerks to a sudden halt, throwing me back upon myself. An interminably long row of cars, buses, trucks and other vehicles stand on ahead. We have pulled up at a railway crossing. Sensing that the train may be long in coming, the driver has lit a cigarette to distract himself. And then leaning against his seat, he is now dragging at it. I don’t really know what it is, his relaxed demeanour or the curls of smoke rising up; suddenly I’m feeling rather edgy, even angry. Father had refused to heed to the repeated injunctions of the doctor against his smoking habits. He had been warned that smoking may ultimately claim his life as well, but did he care? Of late, he had taken to smoking on the sly. It was only on going into the toilet, one day, immediately after he vacated it that I had rushed out, coughing rather badly. The toilet lay choked with cigarette smoke. When I confronted him, later, he had initially demurred, only to concede rather hesitantly, soon after, how he had begun smoking a cigarette or two a day, all over again. With a thousand questions hammering inside my head, my patience was running down, slowly but surely. Could he have saved his life by giving up cigarettes altogether? Despite an awareness of his condition, why did he persist in smoking? What was it, smoking or something else that had ultimately proved to be his undoing? The realisation that all such questions shall now remain unanswered has only sharpened my agony, manifold. I can’t understand why the train is taking so long to arrive? Or why we are stranded in the middle of nowhere? Silently, I even curse the government for not showing enough initiative for building overbridges. Or just about anything we could have used right now to go across, without prolonging our wait, unnecessarily. It is as though this sudden halt, this arrested flow of speed, has left me shaken deep inside. Nothing could have been more disconcerting than this forced halt, this temporary stillness; not even the thought of my father dragging away at his smoke. With each passing moment, my desperation is rising to a pitch and so is my helplessness. Finally, the screaming whistles of the train far in the distance bring a sudden relief to my agitated mind.

It was a morning, just like any other. Smriti was busy getting the children ready for school. I was still lazing around, my morning cup of tea tilting dangerously over the newspaper. I had already scanned the columns of the local daily for the day’s predictions, which is what I did, every morning, as soon as I laid my hands upon the paper. It hadn’t made any startling predictions about the day that awaited me. Another day, teeming with little worries, another day, announcing its ordinariness, its predictable rounds of diurnal cycle. I hadn’t quite made up my mind on how to meet this challenge of ordinariness when the doorbell rang, all of a sudden. It had the shrillness of a dog howling at night. On peeping from my second-storey balcony, I found Punnu uncle standing outside, looking up. With a wave of his hand, as he always did, he had motioned me to come down, saying, “Well, there’s a call for you.” I had rushed down the flight of stairs, breathless. He had taken me inside, his hand resting upon my shoulder. After making me sit down upon a chair opposite his, he had finally broken the news, “This morning, there was a call for you from Amritsar. I think, your neighbour was on the line. He left a message saying that your father wasn’t well and so you must reach immediately. Then, a little while ago, another one came saying, he’s no more.” I had kept looking at him, my mouth wide-open. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I should burst into tears instantaneously. A numbness that had been in my veins for the past several weeks had crawled back, unseen, leaving me transfixed. So much so, Punnu uncle had to shake my shoulders, saying, “What’re you thinking of now. There’s no time to be lost. You must leave immediately.” That’s when something had stirred deep inside, thawing my frozen tears. But there was no time to shed them as so much was still to be done. I had to call up Anurag and inform him, fix up a taxi and, of course, inform my office that I was going out of town. It is strange, this insistence of the service rules that an employee must always plan out when to leave the town, especially when life itself is so unpredictable! While sipping tea in the morning, did I know that I’d have to rush to Amritsar to participate in his final journey? We know so little about our beginnings and our departures, and yet we insist upon framing our lives neatly, as if the order isn’t just there but works as well.     

The train has sped past, whistling away. The barriers at the railway crossing have already lifted. The vehicles in the front have begun to crawl across the railway line. So stubbing out his cigarette, the van driver turns the key in, lurching on ahead, his eyes fixed upon the road, straight and clear. Far into the distance, smoke is rising above the wheat crop, drenched in the golden hue of the afternoon sun. Ripening to a fullness, the shoots are swaying in the hot breeze, unmindful of the tyranny of Baisakh, less than a fortnight away, when, falling under the farmer’s scythe, they would ultimately be flattened to the ground. Balancing a bundle of hay upon her head, a woman is rushing along a narrow pathway running through the fields, her elongated pale, grey shadow falling across. It was the month of April and I was laid up with a bad attack of asthma. For several years, now, this was something that had begun to happen with almost an unfailing sense of regularity. As soon as the harvest season began, my asthma would surface, leaving me debilitated for weeks together. I had had a particularly bad night, as the attack had continued right through, without much reprieve. Though it was afternoon, I was still in the bed, hunched over my stomach, gasping for breath and fighting back my tears. Suddenly, he had come into my room. I had looked into his eyes, pleading for mercy and compassion. I don’t know whether or not he had read the expression in my eyes, but throwing one quick glance at me, he had simply said, “Why don’t you go, kill yourself?” and walked out of the room, slamming the door shut. Hearing him speak in this manner, it was as though the floodgates had been thrown open. I had cried my heart out, sobbing bitterly, wishing death upon myself a hundred times over. But death doesn’t ever come, when solicited; it can neither be wished upon oneself nor anyone else. As a child, I had heard him talk of death several times over, as though it were some familiar story he often told the four of us, as we sat around in a circle, our eyes popping out in a dazed wonder. I must have been around nine when he had called me over to his room, once and after bolting it from inside, thrown open the personal closet, he always kept locked for some reason I could never fathom. Then pulling out a neatly tied up bundle of papers from under a pile of clothes, he had said, “You must open this when I die. This is how you’ll get to know the real story of my life.” Hearing him speak of death with such unconcern, I had almost become hysterical. Unmindful of my tears, he had continued in the same vein, “You’ve another brother, older than you. He’ll come back one day to claim his share. Just do exactly as you find written in this document.” For several days thereafter, I had suffered from an undying curiosity to sneak into his room in his absence, turn the key into the lock, open his closet and take out the bundle. I had even toyed with the idea of growing up overnight in the childlike belief that as an adult nothing could possibly prevent me from gaining an easy access to that mysterious pack of papers. Now rushing towards Amritsar, my mind is suddenly beginning to untie the knots that lie encircling the bundle I haven’t even seen for several years now. Who knows, whether or not those mysterious papers would ever be found? So much has happened in the intervening years; we have moved in and out of so many houses, the bundle, too, must have changed so many cupboards, and it is difficult to say whether it is still in the safe custody of one of them or has quietly slipped out and got lost in one of those uncertain moments of transit. Suddenly I’m seized with a desire to lay my hands upon that bundle, whose existence is a mystery to me now. Suddenly, it has become a sort of filial obligation for me to unlock its dark secrets, as though all the silences of his heart lie neatly wrapped inside, waiting to scream out.               

On getting off the van, we don’t hear any shrill cries or wild, uncontrollable screams the way we had expected. The house lies shrouded in a strange, elusive stillness. Its white colour smudged into a dull greyness. We walk up to the main door in a file, our heads bowed, guiltily. With trembling hands, I push the door open. There he lies upon the floor, covered in a white sheet. Seeing us enter, mother gets up, her eyes already glazed with tears. Throwing her frail arms around me, she bursts into hysterical sobs. And then, by turns, she hugs each of one of us, just as we move from one relative to another, sobbing and wailing, involuntarily, helplessly. All this while, he lies there, as quiet as ever. When I finally remove the sheet off his face for his last darshana, I’m struck by the way his lips lie strangely curled up, as though waiting to say something. All these years, I waited for these pursed lips to open, waited for the silence to flesh itself out into words; silence that lay behind them, inviolate and pure. But now, when he can no longer incarnate his silence into words, this strange curling up of his lips has left me completely shaken. The well-knit scowl that defined his face in life has now suddenly disappeared, leaving a strange calm on his furrowed face. Somewhere behind those creases lies the serenity of Casablanca, my childhood hero, whose story he loved to tell each time we pestered him for one. The boy who had stood on the burning deck, stock-still, in deference to the wishes of his father, waiting to be claimed by him from among the engulfing flames, rising sky-high. Often on reaching this point in the story, my father used to go into a trance, as though the ship had sailed too close to the harbour, as though he could now easily trade places with Casablanca. It was one of those few stories he would never tire of repeating to us, and each time he did so, we found ourselves surging with a desire to respond to every call of duty, a desire which lasted only so long as the story did, never beyond. Now looking at his eyes, with eyelids carefully drawn over them, I’m suddenly reminded of an intense, blazing expression that lies masked. Over the years, the crow’s feet around his eyes have deepened, giving a false sense of gaiety to his sombre, almost a studied expression. The tip of his nose is still as sharp as ever, now pointing skywards, mocking the world. His thin, white hair lie strangely ruffled, bald patches shining through the red streaks of blood congealed at the back of his head. In early hours of the morning, as he stood in the kitchen, preparing a cup of tea for himself, something he occasionally did, he had simply collapsed into a heap, never to rise again. His fall had left marks of injury strangely hidden from the naked eye and certainly not so clearly visible as were its telltale signs. Pulling the sheet back over his face, I wonder if the telltale signs would ever live to tell their tale, of injuries congealed behind his head or bundled inside his heart. Human heart is like a dark cave, rarely ever illumined for those who look at it from outside. Unable to penetrate the depths of its silences, often we only get to see nothing but the fleeting shadows, falling across its dumb walls. It’s a measure of our ignorance that what we take to be the real, substantial things ultimately turn out to have a mere ghostly presence, neither confirmed nor denied. Thousands of ghosts dance within the secret walls of this cave, a territory, which appears strangely familiar but is forever out of bounds, forever elusive. And yet, for centuries now, journeymen have continued to walk through its vast, unending deserts, puzzling over the silence of the Sphinx, little knowing that the promise of a hidden treasure is often not the same thing as stumbling upon the real one.      

Right in the heart of a sprawling, six-acre complex, carefully fortified by red brick walls, stands an old peepul tree, majestic in its impenetrable loneliness. Twisted into myriad shapes, its gnarled roots lie hanging off the stolid branches, eager to touch the ground. A brick platform runs all around, encircling it. Beyond the platform lie vast stretches of uncultivated fields, opening out in all four directions. The factory, which has, since long ceased belching out thick clouds of smoke, now stands apart, almost apologetic about its intrusive, concrete presence. Initially, when the design of the factory was being drawn up, it was decided that the tree shouldn’t be allowed to stand in way of the factory’s construction. But when the labour, working on the site, had refused to axe the tree, defying the clear instructions of the contractor, the engineer had sat up nights, re-drawing the plans. Living in the village close by, people had come to believe that it was sacrosanct to preserve the exclusive privacy of the peepul. It was rumoured that the tree had survived from those times in antiquity when the village had not yet acquired either its present name or its habitation. Someone even recounted how this tree, which once stood in the middle of nowhere, had at some distant point in time, served as a haven for highway robbers and fugitives. Often, at night, they would assemble under its protective canopy, either for dividing among themselves their daily loot or for dumping stolen goods or valuables, including precious gold coins and ornaments in the nearby fields. Another one talked of how, for a long time, this peepul had been a haunt of a pir, who had suddenly disappeared one day, leaving a trail of mystery behind. Over the years, the tree has turned into a hallowed spot, a small structure of bricks raised beside it. Even now, I’m told, every Thursday of the week, someone or the other does make it a point to visit this spot, lighting an earthen lamp on a makeshift ledge. And though the inmates of this vast, sprawling complex have now long since moved out, the weekly ritual, still alive and vibrant, continues, undisturbed. 

I do remember father telling me how he, once, had a strange dream about this very tree, which, incidentally, was much before I was born, while he was still a young man, unmarried. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the government had taken recourse to some stringent forms of taxation, both personal and collective. Heavy taxation had sent the family fortunes into a tailspin, slowly grinding all business to an unexpected halt. Most of the liquidity had either gone towards the payment of the taxes or had been used up in misdirected litigation. With the capital constantly in a short supply, it had become nearly impossible to run the factory at its existing capacity, and much less think of pushing through any pre-war plans of future expansion. Such was the situation, when, one night, he had dreamt of the unlimited treasure lying buried underneath the peepul tree. A particularly vivid dream, in which he not only saw caskets overflowing with pearls, gems and diamonds but also a black cobra guarding the treasure, hissing menacingly, its fangs spread wide apart. Haunted by this dream for a long time, he had often debated with himself the possibility of sharing it with the other members of the family but then, for some inexplicable reason, had refrained from doing so. When the dream had begun to surface again and again, repeating itself with an unnerving regularity, he had simply gone ahead and hired the labour to get the digging-in started off. Going against the popular opinion, he had used his initiative, hoping to unearth the unlimited treasure that lay entombed. They had hardly been at the job a few hours, and perhaps cut only marginal digs around the peepul roots, when one of workers suddenly developed convulsions and later died, within a span of few weeks. That was the only time father supervised any attempt at a treasure hunt, which had to be aborted prematurely, abandoned much before it could actually begin. 

That day, while returning home from school, Hemant and I had missed the bus. In those days of erratic bus services, it always took more than an ordinary effort to reach the school or return home on time. Often, only a few buses plied on this route, connecting that part of the town where the school was and our village where we lived in a white mansion, surrounded by the red brick walls. And whenever we missed the bus, either way, it meant a wait of no less than an hour and a half, even two, at times. So we had decided to walk across to the petrol pump, some distance off, from where it was always possible to hire a tonga, something we usually did, each time the bus packed up on us. But that day, tonga-ride had turned out to be somewhat different, much more than a pleasurable ride back home. As all the seats were occupied, Hemant and I had positioned ourselves on the two opposite poles that jutted out of the tonga frame, supporting the saddle. Sitting right next to the tonga driver, I was constantly trying to balance my weight upon the pole, fearing that a sudden trot of the horse might send me hurtling down, unexpectedly. But the horse was moving apace, as though it had been trained not to fall out of rhythm. Suddenly, directing his attention towards us, one of the passengers shot a question, “Oye mundeo, where do you live?” 

“Across the railway line.” I was quick to reply. 

“Where exactly in the village?” 

“No, it isn’t inside the village. It’s a little distance short of. …”  

Before I could say a word more, another passenger spoke up, “Sardara, you don’t know them? They’re the grandsons of Lala Kishan Chand.” 

That very moment, a sudden hush fell across the tonga, and nothing could be heard except the rat-a-tat of the horses’ hooves. Even those passengers, who were engrossed in their own gossip, paying only scant attention to our conversation, suddenly fell silent. I had felt rather uncomfortable, even embarrassed at having been denied this opportunity of introducing myself. I was still making up my mind on how to react when someone, sitting in the rear seat, chirped rather merrily, “Oh, these Lalas! Who doesn’t know them? They’re the ones who own that factory. It’s perhaps one of the oldest in the area, too.” 

“Yes, I know, my father used to work for them. He would often tell me all kinds of stories,” the tonga-driver, too, jumped in, cracking his whip on the horse. Now, this was enough to raise eyebrows, all around. Forgetting all about our existence, the passengers’ had started edging closer to the tonga-driver, their curiosity peaking into wide-eyed, mysterious smiles. Perhaps, this kind of prompting was about all that the tonga-driver needed. Rattling his whip across the wheel of the tonga, signalling the horse to fall into a quicker stride, he started off, “They say, this factory actually belonged to a French Saab. He had come to India before the war started. All the machinery was imported from France. Thousands of workers used to work for him. He was very kind and generous. Always at hand to help his workers out of their problems. They say, once, one of his workers lost his arm in an accident on a machine. The Saab somehow got to know that the poor fellow was the only breadwinner in his family. He had offered him a very handsome compensation, apart from a peon’s job in the office. He really had a heart of gold.” 

“But then, how did these Lalas get the ownership of this factory?” queried one of the younger passengers. Throwing one quick glance at both of us, the tonga-driver resumed his story, “I don’t know how far it is true. But they say Lala Kishan Chand was only a minor partner.  After the war started, it became extremely difficult for the French Saab to continue operating his business from India. He was forced to return to France. Some say that before leaving, he sold off all his shares to these Lalas...” At this point, the tonga-driver suddenly pulled the reins, bringing the tonga to a halt. A passenger got off, paid his money and went his way, and when the tonga lurched into motion, once again, the driver’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Some also say that the elder Lala hired goons and got the French Saab killed. This is how ownership of the factory changed hands.” With these words, the tonga-driver had fallen silent, whipping up a storm within, which had continued to explode inside me for the rest of the journey. Though I had remained tight-lipped, exchanging an occasional helpless, guilty expression with Hemant, I had not been able to lift my head again to meet the gaze of other passengers. Most of them were perhaps glaring at me as though I wasn’t just another normal-looking, school going child but a malformed Asthavakra, a freak who had no right to be where he was. 

That day, on returning home, I had sat by the window of my room for hours together, looking out. In the evening, when the sun was about to set, its crimson light had suddenly set the red bricks of the boundary wall aflame. I don’t know what it was, the effect of the tears rising in my eyes or the light shimmering upon the wall, at least, momentarily, it felt as though blood was dripping off the crevices of red bricks.                    

  

(Excerpts from a novel titled: THOSE EIGHTEEN DAYS)      

                        *                                             * 

My Thoughts on the Eve of 2012

Tomorrow, it’ll be a dawn like any other, 

but you'll look at it differently. 
Tomorrow, it’ll be a day like any other, 
but you'll meet it differently. 
Tomorrow, it’ll be as cold as it is today, 
but you'll respond to it differently, 
with more warmth and more affection. 
Tomorrow will not bring any more hope, peace or joy 
than is already there in your heart, 
Or what you choose to imbue it with. 
Time, Life, Circumstance and Attitude change 
only if we do....
Let this be my prayer for you, O friends, in 2012
That you’ll make of life what you want it to be....
That you’ll utter the thoughts you love to hear...
That you’ll sing the song you wish to listen to....
Be the singer, the song, the flute, and also the mesmerized listener.            
Be the rasa and the rasika, 
Life will never elude you. 
And God will always bless you.  

--Rana Nayar 

How to Build a Play?

By Rana Nayar

Before we talk of ‘how’ to build a play, let us briefly talk of ‘what’ a play is and ‘how’ it is made. Let me start off by saying that the art of ‘making’ or ‘building’ a play is different from the art of writing a poem or a novel. Put simply, a play is not just a collocation of words on a printed page (text) but is made or created within the precincts of a ‘theatre’ (which is what Peter Brooks calls The Empty Space). (All great playwrights have been apprentices who created their plays, not in the privacy of their rooms but in the lively and vibrant ambience of theatre. Shakespeare, Ibsen, Mahesh Dattani). It is this ‘performative’ (text as performance or text in performance) aspect of drama that makes it very different from other genres.

I’m not saying that a poem or a novel can’t be dramatized or performed, it could well be; but a play is not a play unless it is performed. It is in this sense that we often say that a play is twice-born. A play has two lives, first as a text and then as a performance. And if it is a good play, it will multiply these two lives into several hundred or thousand. (Imagine how many productions Sophocles’ King Oedipus, Antigone or Shakespeare’s Hamlet or King Lear must have had. Simply countless. To my mind, this is what building a play is all about; it is creating it in a way that it has several lives. More re-runs it has, more chances of it acquiring an enduring, eternal life.

Let’s look at the etymology of the term DRAMA. It is traced back to the Greek word ‘drame’ which means to act or to do. Drama is connected with action. Aristotle also defines it as a form of imitation...imitation of an action. Important thing is that in drama thought has no meaning if it doesn’t manifest itself as an action. Often, in drama action and thought go together. For example, let’s think of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. In that play Macbeth wants to kill Duncan. He harbours a murderous thought. Is that enough? No, it isn’t. In that case, the play will not move forward and if it doesn’t, nothing will happen. And if nothing happens, there will be no play (Everyone is not as ingenuous as Beckett that they should be able to create a play out of nothing). For instance, if Hamlet (in the play of the same name) just keeps thinking of avenging his father’s murder, he won’t be able to act. He can’t act because he thinks too much. Thinking has paralyzed his capacity to act. And that is his problem, too.

Now in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot “nothing happens twice” as one critic puts it. The characters simply wait and in this process of waiting, so much happens that one is often left completely stunned. In modern drama, action happens inside the mind or as J. L. Stylan says: ‘All drama is in the mind.” Theatre, as I said earlier is “an empty space” and by that logic, human mind is also a tabula rasa. Just as we can create unimaginable possibilities in theatre, so we can write innumerable images, experiences and impressions on this clean slate called mind. Be it physical or mental, a play is action of one kind or the other. A play is the art of doing, making, building and creating or simply, an act of doing something meaningful. Yes, the word meaningful is important for me here.

Now for any action to be possible, you have to be in a group or what we call an ensemble. (An ensemble is a term from music which means that all the musicians in a concert play different instruments and yet manage to build up towards a totality called ‘harmony’. In an ensemble, an individual musician contributes effectively to the overall impact of the music). Now imagine that you are sitting in a room by yourself. What are the options you have? You could either look out of the window or at the walls. Or you could pick up a book from the shelf and start browsing it or you may tire of everything and go off to sleep. A single person in a room doesn’t offer any dramatic potential. Unless, he starts doing loud thinking or starts soliloquizing. But again, there are limits beyond which it can’t be done. Now imagine that you are alone in the room and your friend walks in, saying: “WHAT’S UP?” The moment, you say, “Yaar, I was just lazing around”, it is the beginning of conversation. But does that mean that this conversation will always develop into a dialogue? It may be so, but it is not necessarily so.

The real question is: how is an ordinary conversation different from a dialogue? Often conversations are unstructured, but dialogues are always structured. The moment you begin, you know the direction in which it has to proceed. Or else it would just meander freely and not move in any direction. So dialogue is a “meaningful conversation,” a structured conversation. Now, how does a dramatist create these “meaningful verbal structures?” (You may call dialogue this, for convenience). Think of the opening scenes of Shakespeare and you’ll know what I’m talking about. All right, let me remind you of Ibsen’s play Ghosts. It begins with two relatively minor characters, Engstrand and Regina. Engstrand walks into the room where Regina is. He has come in from the garden where he was working, is soaked to the skin, and says: “It’s the Lord’s rain, I tell you.” Regina says: “It’s the devil’s rain, I say.” Now this might be simply treated as a comment on weather and dismissed off. But if we read closely, we discover that it is not about weather but about the theme or ‘structure of ideas’ that Ibsen wants to develop in the play. Engstrand who gives the impression of being a pious, God-fearing man turns out to be a ‘rogue’ and even a ‘devil’ Regina is referring to. (In a play, things often don’t turn out the way we expect them to. There is a great deal of difference between the ‘surface’ and ‘latent meaning’, between the ‘illusion’ and ‘reality.’) So, this is what is called a structured dialogue. Dialogue is structured because it defines and creates the character, reveals his/her intentions or motives behind the words; configures a situation and also ensures that the possibility of onward movement of action is constantly fulfilled, at least, until such times as the play doesn’t reach a climax and/or resolution. If drama is action, then let us remember, dialogue is spoken action.

Now if action has to move forward and has to have an onward momentum, what should a dramatist do? Well, the least he could do is to ensure that the action must not move forward along the lines that we, the readers or spectators, either suspect it will or expect it to. If it were to so happen, the basic purpose of creating a drama would be defeated. Drama is nothing if it is not suspense. Drama is nothing if its action is predictable. Unpredictability is what makes drama what it is, and implausibility is what ruins drama completely. Add to this the fact that when we go to watch a play, often our interest is not in what the story is, but how it is dramatized. It’s ‘how’ more that ‘what’ that defines the essence of drama. So, a good dramatist always captures the attention of his reader/spectator right from the word go. Starting his action in the middle (or what is called ‘Medias Res’) of things, a dramatist first creates a crisis-situation and then goes about resolving it.  

Playwright is more like a carpenter or a shipbuilder who first dis-assembles a story in his workshop and then re-assembles it. It’s like putting different parts of a ship together or putting bricks or blocks to create a structure of a house or a building. Have you ever thought: Why we use the term playwright for a person who writes plays? You’ll say, well, it is obvious, because he writes plays. But my dear, the spellings are very different. It’s PLAYWRIGHT, just the way we say, SHIPWRIGHT. A shipwright is a person who builds a ship and a playwright is a person who builds a play. We call a dramatist a playwright only because the term has all the meanings of a builder, an artisan, a craftsman, a mechanic rolled into it. No wonder, Aristotle called playwright a craftsman, someone who shapes plays out of someone else’s story, just the way a carpenter shapes raw wood into different pieces of furniture. 

Now this is important. A playwright is not an inventor of stories; he is only a user of stories. A playwright always works with the material others have produced. He only reproduces it. It could be a folk-tale, a legend, a myth, a slice of history, a real-life incident, a newspaper report or just about any scrap of information. A playwright possesses the necessary ability to transmute this material into something potentially dramatic, exciting and unpredictable. This raises a fundamental question: Is playwright’s craft in any way inferior to that of poets and novelists? No, certainly not. In the ultimate analysis, it requires imagination to build anything, be it a novel, a poem or a play. If you wish to be a playwright, you must start off with a ‘story-telling session’. Unless we master the art of story-telling, we can’t become good playwrights. Now you might say that this is contrary to what I said a little while ago. No it isn’t. I did say that a playwright works with the ‘stories’ others have created but this doesn’t mean a playwright has no sense of how a story works. In fact, he has a better sense of how a story works as compared to a story-teller, because he re-tells stories. So, it is a good idea to start telling stories about yourself, about people around whom you may or may not know. One could pick up a story the group is familiar with, narrate it to them once and ask the group to re-tell it in a piecemeal manner, each member of the group adding a dialogue or a character as s/he leads it forward.

There can be hundred and one ways of telling the same story and the group must discover at least a few out of those hundred odd. This is important if the group has to understand the difference between a story and a plot. E. M. Forster explains this distinction very well. Forster says, ‘King dies and the Queen also dies’ is a story, but ‘King dies and the Queen dies of grief’ is a plot. In a plot, incidents have to be connected logically and causally. Let us remember that a plot is a reconstruction of a story. It is in the process of telling and re-telling that a group will learn to explore different ways of starting a play or an effective beginning, as they say. We know how the legend of Oedipus works. And we also know that the play King Oedipus doesn’t begin in the same way as the legend does. (You may explain the difference at this point).

Now what does it mean to change a story into a plot? It only means that ‘time-space’ arrangement of the story has to be re-adjusted. In other words, plotting a story is all about re-mapping the two coordinates of human experience dominating any specific human situation, including a drama, i.e., time and space. We know that all human experience happens within the frame of time and space and also makes sense within this frame. Let me say, what is true of human experience is equally true of drama. Now, what does it mean to create this time-space frame? You are sitting in this hall, and today is March 5, 2011. This defines your location in time-space continuum. All plays have to have a location, a setting, an atmosphere and must belong to a definite period of time as well. Shakespeare was very fond of locating the action of his plays in late medieval or early Renaissance Italy. This helped him look at his own society from a distance. By locating the action in time-space, a playwright imparts a sense of reality as well as structure to his plays.      

As the group starts dramatizing the story, it has to bear in mind that the first step towards dramatization is: creating dialogues and also creating characters who speak these dialogues. Now you would say, it is simple enough, but it isn’t as simple as it sounds. I have already spoken to you about the ‘dialogue’ and how it is different from an ‘ordinary conversation’. Now let me make a few observations about the character. In a way, a character in drama is just another person, like you and me. A character is the product of one of the several possibilities that are inherent in you and me. You are not King Lear or King Oedipus, but given a different set of circumstances, you may become either. So, a character always has a ‘being’ and more significantly, s/he is always in a state of ‘becoming’; character is a series of possibilities out of which some may be explored and others left unexplored by a playwright. His selection of incidents and situations from his life depends largely upon the way and the direction in which he wants the character to develop.

And let us remember that a character always develops within the framework of a particular drama, which is also to say, that s/he could develop differently in a different context. People have experimented with this idea. Someone has written a play on Lady Macbeth, who only plays a supportive role in the play Macbeth and someone on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Tom Stoppard), who are only minor characters in Hamlet. Let me list a few things that a playwright remembers while creating a character. These are: consistency, credibility, plausibility and internal coherence. All this might sound too textual, so let me now talk of how to create a character on the stage. We all understand that role-playing is an important aspect of socialization. Not only do we have to understand the limits, demands, requirements and obligations of our role, but also perform them in a fairly consistent manner. If we don’t do it, we invite the charge of being undependable or acting in a manner inconsistent with our character.

So role-playing is central to character making. Just as re-telling story is important to discover how to make a plot, so role-playing is important to know how to make a character.  Just ask a group of students to act and behave like someone else, perhaps their teacher. As it progresses, one can add other elements to it, such as gestures, facial expressions, style of walking or talking and even costumes. What actually starts as a game becomes a more serious exercise towards ‘creating a character’. You have a story you are prepared to re-tell, you have written a series of structured dialogues, and your role-playing is becoming more than a game; well, you don’t have to build the play anymore. You have arrived at a crucial moment when it is ready to be staged.

I have shared some of these observations with you in the hope that each one of you has a budding actor, a playwright or a director inside you. You always had the potential, now you have the roadmap as well. Just go ahead and realize your latent potential. And once you do so, the play will start rolling off your workshop.  

Do I see the clouds of smoke rising somewhere out there? Is someone’s imagination on fire? Is something cooking? And, is it a play, by any chance?

       

   

Copyright.in - Copyright registration and filling

Copyright.in - Copyright registration and filling

Rana Nayar

A boy who turned his back on the world

I’m like a boy 

Who with back on the world

Sits ponderously,

Facing the ocean

His eyes lost in the mist of mountains

His gaze moving from earth to heaven

Skies lowering themselves to his size

Spreading like a canopy over his shrinking world

The ocean waters flowing silently

No turbulence anywhere in sight

No agitation of the mind

No restlessness of the heart 

No flutter of the soul, either

Time is perhaps grinding to a halt

Waters are melting into the mountains

From whence they come

Who knows, whence they go.

On looking up

He finds it all turn into a blur,

The waters

The mist

The mountains

And his gaze.  

Perched on the assurance of a hard stone 

He ponders on and on,

And moves from one to the other

Returning to himself

Or his stony structure

Framing his existence,

Echoing a name

That may ultimately drown in the mist

Or float on the cloud-borne skies

Or leave foot-tracks in an unknown, dark forest

That runs through the mountains,

Somewhere far out, and deep.