A Weekend With The Shahs (July, 2004)

It was a chance comment that triggered off the blast, some casual remark about a play being staged over the weekend. Recovering from Friday night excesses, a more detailed investigation revealed that it was only half true….Naseeruddin Shah’s theatre group Motley was actually staging two plays back-to-back over the weekend! Since Ismat Aaapaa Ke Naam was first staged, I wanted to watch it but somehow like the other favourite play of mine, Winkle Twinkle, it suspiciously avoided me across cities like plague. On the top of that, there was this bonus in form of Dear Liar, a play written by Jerome Kilty in 1957 based on the correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Stella Campbell, a famous contemporary actress. So happily my eyes went about probing the venue and the tickets and all that jazz….when the ticket prices hit me like a malignant eye-sore.
The reaction to a price in terms of demand, as classically defined, is a function of the utility, or rather the marginal utility of the good or service to the consumer. In case of theatre ticket prices, I think history also counts…maybe whether his city has an Academy of Fine Arts or not. Coming from Kolkata, where the Arts are highly subsidized, spending Rs.500 on a ticket seemed slightly weird, but Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Pathak Shah, Ismat Khanum Chughtai and George Bernard Shaw being who they are, I really had no option. More deserving connoisseurs of the theatre were however left behind though by this prohibitive pricing, and justice favoured the corporate.
And surely enough the Saturday arrived with khadi clad intellectuals, nattily dressed crème de la crème of Delhi and chattering youngsters. There were women who seemed to be coming from the wrong side of the green room, and women who were beautifully intelligent…the men were mostly extremes- paunchy or chiseled. The anticipation was building up like a gas bubble, and I kept on consoling it with nicotine till the second bell rang. And the din quietened. Two figures confidently strutted into the spotlight, introduced themselves as Naseeruddin and Ratna Paathak Shah and took us all to the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.
The Shahs were deliciously British and as they read out the letters, or rather lived out the letters, one could almost feel the intense love and friendship, which bound Shaw and Campbell together. Despite being respectively married, pun intended, it seemed that theirs was a relationship which resembled a harp. There were strings with different intonations, different shades, and different notes- but when played by Shaw’s sharp wit or Campbell’s affectionate arrogance, sounded so beautifully harmonious, so sonorous. The World Wars, Pygmalion, St.Joan and The Great Depression haunted the slightly disappointing props like spirits as the Shahs forged and etched an unforgettable relationship under grease paint, time turning and impressing minds such as mine.
Come Sunday, I was even more excited as the period in which Ismat Aaapaa, as she was affectionately called, wrote, were the Pre-independence years which has cradled some wonderful story-tellers and ditties. Also I strongly feel as simple narrators or story-tellers, women are slightly ahead of their male counterparts…starting from our grannies. And since Motley decided to go in for the narrative style of drama, as opposed to the recreational style, it suited my expectations fine. Three of Ismat Aapaa’s short stories were told with great vigour (accompanied by a relatively pedestrian score by Vishaal Bharadwaj); they came to life as each member of Motley, the Shahs and their daughter Heeba played the Sutradhar and all the characters in each of the three plays. It started with Chui Mui enacted by Heeba who was promising and excellent in patches- the overtly strong Urdu flavour robbed her rendition of some easy flowing humour but her histrionic powers shone through all right. It was a touching tale of childbirth on a train- how a rural woman orchestrates her own delivery and how three upper class women react to the incident, interspersed with an acerbic commentary of status of women in a pre-partition Muslin household in Uttar Pradesh.
Ratna Paathak Shah was in her elements in the next story, which dealt with a love story of epic proportions, in terms of the sheer span of the passion and fecund imagery of the much-touted male ego. ‘Mughal Bachcha’ was all about the anachronism of the Mughal pride in a fast changing world under the British Rule and on a more universal note, the futility of false pride in matters of the heart. Having seen so many Gori Bis and Kaale Mians in my short tenure on this planet, identification and appreciation came very smoothly for me. Mrs. Shah’s body language was the highlight of the story as she recreated the images of the septuagenarian story-teller, of the shy yet angry, eternally optimistic Gori Bi and the haughty Kaale Mian; with consummate ease.
But as if to celebrate the saying ‘Save the best for the last’, the play beautifully climaxed to Naseer’s turn at narrating ‘Gharwali’. This story is admittedly much more malleable to dramatic adaptation and has been indeed adapted a number of times before. However Naseeruddin Shah delivered a one-man powerhouse performance to lift it to newer heights, and tempted me to change the title of this piece to An Evening With Naseeruddin Shah. Luckily for the sake of neutrality, which some wise crack had wisecracked is the greatest prejudice, I retained the original title. Otherwise his impact could might have had its sway.
‘Gharwali’ is the story of a bastard child Laajo and how society instills in her a mix of feminine servility and promiscuity, and she is as Aaapaa puts it, generous with her love, service, body and soul. Her masters change but not her willingness to serve one with virgin honesty of heart. And then she falls for Mirza, or rather the respect he gives her, the dignity, the warm security of a home that she could possess. She even gives up her promiscuous ways, only retaining her boisterous and flirtatious demeanor. It is a story of Mirza who inspite visiting brothels, strongly believes in a righteous distinction between the Andar- mahal and the outside world. How in turn, Laajo becomes his servant, then wife and then again servant is the skeleton of the narrative in form of a satire on the institution of marriage. Their relationship blooms under the master-servant paradigm..it is infact, closest to known data points of marital bliss. Only when expectations creep in with patriarchal dos and don’t with a formal marriage that the relationship sours. Mirza effectively kills off the spirit that made her irresistible to him and in the process, gets frustrated himself with the change. Only when he luckily finds out that their marriage stands annulled because she is a bastard, that he, and subsequently, they find peace. The lanterns in his Haveli are again lit up, ‘phulka’s pampered by her soft, white hands again remind him of his mother’s culinary touch and all is hunky dory. The only difference now, as the closing lines suggest, was that he doesn’t have to hesitate to jump into bed with her as before in their first master-servant tryst…technically his servant, Mirza eventually realizes that Laajo was more of a ‘Gharwali’ than the holy Nikah could ever imagine.
There are actors who make the characters they play turn into them. An art, to be fair to the mega stars of Indian acting fraternities, is not very easy and indeed indispensable for the star system to flourish and rake in the moolah. But what is really difficult is to become the character, to get under the skin. And the Shahs, did just that over this weekend, and more. For it wasn’t one skin or one heart or one mind they had to get into, it was a multitude of them, making their surname worthwhile....truly, a royal treat.