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ENCOUNTERS OF THE UNBELIEVABLE KIND
by A.V.
Dhanushkodi
Hamlet:
“There are more things in heaven an earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your
philosophy ”--- HAMLET, ACT I, Scene V
EPISODE
ELEVEN -- Stage Whisper
April 1972. The rented Ambassador
groaned its way up the winding Himalayan road towards Simla, with me in the
front seat, next to the driver. Dr.
Lechner, Director of The Goethe Institute in Delhi,
and Wolfram Mehring, the famous Austrian mime artiste from Paris, were in the back seat, chatting all
the way up, distracting my attention from the magnificent scenic beauty of the
mountains. Were I not able to
understand their language, the sound alone of their chatter would not have
bothered me in the least. But I
understood German and spoke it well too, two of the four reasons I was selected
to participate in the ten-day all-India theatre seminar and workshop in Simla. The third reason was that I was the “prima
donna” of the pioneering German theatre group of India
in Madras and
the fourth was I was one of the star performers of the English theatre group
The Madras Players.
The van, which followed us, contained
the cream of Indian theatre personalities from Delhi,
Bombay, Calcutta,
Hyderabad, and Bangalore: Satyadev Dubey, Burjor Patel, Om
Shivpuri, Sudha Shivpuri, Chetna Tiwari, Ajitesh Banerjee, Ram Gopal Bajaj,
Rajinder Nath, Rajinder Paul, Rajen Brijnath, Dr. Srinivasan, Kulbushan
Karbandha, and Mohan Rakesh (the playwright who wrote the experimental play for
the workshop). During the climb up the undulating mountain
range, I often wished I were with them in the van to enjoy the Himalayan
beauty, when their chatter would have meant nothing more than noise, since I
did not understand much of Hindi, as it had gone rusty with disuse. It was an ironic situation to be in, where I
could understand foreigners but not my own people: one of the paradoxes of
pan-Indian culture.
After more than an hour-long climb, we
stopped in front of a magnificent mansion, the Vice Regal Lodge, the former
residence of Viceroy Lord Dufferin, designed by the renowned architect Henry
Irwin, presently housing the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. It was here
that many historic decisions were taken, including the partition of India.
The walls were not plastered, with just
the burnt-sienna coloured bricks showing, giving the building a sombre dignity,
rarely to be found in recently constructed buildings. It was on an elevated level, away from the
town, which we were to visit almost every day in the following ten days of our
stay there.
As our luggage was being unloaded and
taken to our allotted rooms, we stretched our legs, walking around, enjoying
the cool air and the stately and serene ambience. I was keen to look at the
rear of the building as well, always interested in old and dilapidated
buildings, not with an eye for appreciating the different architectural styles,
but with the eye of an artist for sketching or painting them, if possible. Apart from the style of the structures, old
buildings have innumerable little, little, tell-tale signs of their own history
from the time they were built, which people, who had lived there through years
and centuries, would have left behind. Those
signs give them a living character, as that of old men, unlike new-born clean-
slate babies, waiting to be written on.
I ambled along the façade of the
building, admiring every inch of it and turned around its flank and suddenly
came face to face with the most breathtaking vision I had ever seen. I stood there, mesmerized and paralysed, I
knew not how long. Before me, spanning
the whole breadth of the sky, in its entire visibility of 180 degrees, were
peak after peak after peak of sparkling white Himalayan range, magically
hanging in mid-air! Turquoise blue sky
above and below!
That day and all the following days of
our stay there, my soul was soaked
fully with that magnificent vision day and night. The vision changed from time to
time with the changing light of the sun and the moon: the sky
from turquoise to cerulean to cobalt to ultramarine and so on, and the peaks from
flake white to pale vermilion to crimson to cadmium orange to lemon yellow to
naples yellow and so on. I can go on
listing all the blues and greenish blues and all the yellows, reds, and oranges,
but still be woefully short of words to descibe the hues, shades, and tones
nature played with, in an endless show of pure and divine magic.
*
I was put up with Burjor Patel from the
Parsi theatre in Bombay, a very gentle and soft
spoken young actor, who had made a mark with his theatre group in Bombay. The room was large with parquet flooring, bay
windows, and furnished with highly polished ornamental chairs, tables and
sofas. We were delighted beyond words,
when we took in everything in one sweep, except the spring cots, a bane for me
in particular. At the time I was
suffering from severe and constant back-pain.
I feared, the spring cot might make me an invalid by the time the
seminar was over. Luckily, it did not.
The room reminded me of the two guest
rooms on the ground floor of our residence in Karaikal, when my father took
over from the French on November 1, 1954.
While in college, whenever I
spent my holidays with my parents, I spent almost all my time in one or
the other of those rooms reading my favourite authors. When Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were
on an official visit to Pondicherrry and Karaikal for a couple of days, they
stayed in those rooms, as did India’s
first President Dr. Rajendra Prasad and Morarji Desai, who was then a Central
Cabinet Minister in the Congress ministry and later became the Prime Minister,
when the Janatha Party came to power, much later. I still preserve the precious gems of photographs of my parents with them
during the visits of those dignitaries.
*
The next day, after breakfast, we got down to business. We decided to split into four groups, under
four eminent directors: Ajitesh Banerjee from Calcutta, Satyadev Dubey from Bombay, Rajinder Nath from Delhi, and
Wolfram Mehring. Each group would
produce the same play, to be presented at the end of the workshop at Gaiety
Theatre, the oldest theatre in India, designed by the
architect Henry Irwin and constructed in the year 1887. I was to work with Ajitesh Banerjee. Only later, that night, I was to discover
that my contribution extended beyond being just an actor.
In addition to the participants from
different theatre groups from all over India,
there were the charming group of girls from the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, residents of Simla, working for the All India Radio and the
Doordharshan. Their specialization was
in song, dance, and drama. Almost all of
them were put together in Mehring’s group, along with some of the participants
I have already mentioned. In addition to
donning one of the roles in the play in Ajitesh Banerjee’s group, I was to help
Mehring in communicating with the girls, as his working knowledge of English
was rather shaky. Ironically, my working
knowledge of Hindi was more shaky. We
managed, nevertheless,
to invent a hybrid language between
German, English, and Hindi.
Every
night, after dinner, we would all meet in the drawing room, to exchange
notes on the day’s work, relaxing in the warmth of real fire in the
hearth. There too, I had to play the role
of an interpreter for Mehring. The
discussions would start on a low key but, as time progressed, they became
fiery. Coupled with the task of
interpreting Mehring to the others, the discussions got too hot for me, making
me feel that the fireplace was one too much for the occasion for me.
*
We fell into a routine of getting up
early every morning and taking a pleasant walk down to the Mall, a kind of an
open space in the centre of Simla, and returning for a sumptuous breakfast, after which we
split, to work with our groups on the play until lunch. Breakfast,
lunch, and dinner were unfailingly
veritable feasts fit for kings and queens. After lunch, we rested for an hour or two and
resumed work and continued until about
5. Evenings, we took leisurely walks to
the town again, just to loiter around
and do petty shopping, as we walked the narrow alleys, along houses and shops
on the terraced slopes. After dinner,
there were discussions and exchanges of notes, sipping either wine or brandy.
*
The playwright Mohan Rakesh remarked in
his Preface to the play Mad Delight,
“The present script, which is only an outline, should be treated just as
suggestions in the matter of juxtaposing sound, words, and visuals as parallel
entities, all independent and yet very much interdependent; while they exist
and grow in separation, they are not all meaningful separately. Whatever meaning can be discovered in them is
only in their collaborative totality. With any shift of emphasis the meaning
can, will, and should change.”
In our group, Ajitesh Banerjee asked me
to be the Voice, which introduced the play, made comments on the actions, and
interacted with the characters. He put
me on a high pedestal, which nobody ever did until then, either literally or
figuratively, and froze me, as I had to “act” only with my voice. My face alone was lit in the darkness and I
literally became a disembodied voice, as the playwright Mohan Rakesh had
intended it to be. I was more than happy
to do my part, as my voice was good and strong but, in order to decapitate myself I had to hold in front of my face a lit
candle stuck on a small metal plate, which got hotter and hotter by the minute.
The single lit candle gave an eerie and
ghostly look to my face (even without so much pains I looked eerie, ghostly,
and weird anyway). I had to be extremely
careful not to blow out the candle with my breathing and voice or get my
moustache singed in the process. Even the
master magician P.C. Sorcar would have thought thrice before undertaking such an
abominable venture, but I did it on the day of the performance, if not during
the rehearsals. What I found more harrowing than that feat was something else
which seemed more simple but was not:
delivering my lines in Hindi!
I had learnt Hindi in school, but allowed
it to rust out of disuse. Those days,
Tamilians were averse to speaking in Hindi, especially students of my age,
thanks to the anti-Hindi agitations of the Dravidian political parties DK and
the DMK, with their leaders fomenting anti-Hindi feelings with their fiery street-junction
speeches and flowery writings in their journals Dravida Nadu, Murasoli, and Thendral.
Now, after nearly twenty years, I was
called upon to perform a nerve racking task.
I protested many times, but Banerjee would hear none of it. I even
thought up dirty tricks and spoke the language with a horrible accent and bad pronunciation, which Ajitesh happily accepted,
ascribing them to my South Indian origin; in fact,
he was most appreciative of my effort, saying that my Hindi was really good, although
with a south Indian flavour. Also, I
often pretended to forget lines, but Ajitesh understood my unfamiliarity with
the language and assured me that, with more rehearsals, I should be fine on the
D-day. As the D-day (read Dooms Day)
approached, I became more and more agitated.
One evening, I decided to go to the
Gaiety Theatre to take my mind off the oppressive rehearsals and get acquainted
with the stage and the auditorium. It
took me some time before I could convince the caretaker of the theatre that I
belonged to the theatre-workshop group, which would be performing there
soon. When he finally let me in
reluctantly through the stage door, I walked on to the stage and stood in the
middle of it, facing the auditorium. What
I felt then was most singular, when I think on it now as I write. The theatre was an almost exact replica of
the Museum Theatre in Madras,
where I had performed for The Madras Players countless number of times, except that it was a mini
version of the Museum Theatre! As I
stood there, I felt like a player on his home-turf, and knew instantly that
everything was going to be great! There
were, of course, a few differences: the whole semi-circular auditorium was just
about the dimensions of the pit in the
Museum Theatre and there were balconies above the audience, to seat the
VIPs. However, that which attracted my
attention most, were the huge dimmers of the stage-lights, or the
rheostats: used to operating electronic thumbnail-knobs,
I was truly thrilled to see huge rheostats, about four feet high, with wooden
handles one had to lift up or push down, to vary the brightness of the
stage-lights!
As I stood there, allowing the whole
atmosphere to soak in, I suddenly hit
upon the idea of rehearsing my role then and there! By then, I had learnt all my lines. However, what I quote now is what I remember
in English and Hindi, after about 40 years, not a verbatim rendering of the script.
I exited the stage and made an entry,
miming a lit candle in my cupped hands.
I stood in the centre of the stage, at the back, and slowly started
saying my lines in Hindi.
“And that is the crisis of the
age. The crisis involves values. The values involve an epidemic of ideas….”
I trailed off, as I heard some indistinct
noises. I could not say for sure, from
where or caused by what. They were like
static electric noises one hears while tuning a radio. They stopped within seconds after I stopped.
I decided to ignore it and continued
with my lines, “Manushya ke jeevan main sab kuch mila-jula hai…..” Again I
trailed off when I heard the noises, a little louder this time. They started within seconds after I started
and stopped seconds after I stopped.
This time I was more puzzled and annoyed. Could they be seeping in from the
street? I dismissed the thought
immediately, as I was convinced that Henry Irwin would never have designed an auditorium with such
bad acoustics. I recollected having read
that Gaiety Theatre was well-known for its excellent acoustics. Then I realized it could not have been the
street noises, because they stopped the moment I stopped. Also, the street noises would be distinctly
different and would not be dovetailed to my delivery of the lines. The only
plausible explanation I could think of was that it must be a faint echo of my
voice, because the auditorium was empty.
If that was true, I had nothing to worry about, as the echo would not occur,
when the auditorium was filled with audience, hopefully. Comforted by that conclusion, I delivered my lines from
the beginning to the end with ease and complete satisfaction, despite the
disturbing noises trailing after my VOICE.
When I returned to the guesthouse,
dinner was in progress. As I joined the
others, I was welcomed by some of the young participants with Mona Lisa smiles
on their lips and oblique references to escapades with the pretty girls from
the Song, Dance, and Drama Division. How
I wished they
were true!
*
The hall was full. Directly opposite the stage, I was sitting
with Rajen Brijnath, a participant from Calcutta. Each of us had a big drum in front, assigned
to drum away for Dubey’s vigorous version of the
play!
We held our breath
and waited for the third bell to go.
When it did, all hell broke loose!
It sounded and looked really like the
D-day, when the Allied Troops landed on the Normandy
beaches on June 6, 1944! We were caught
up in a torrent of sounds, voices, action, and reaction. Actors and stage-props tumbled on to the
stage, ran, jumped, danced, screamed, and we added our mighty part by drumming
away furiously for Dubey and Chetna Tiwari doing the dance of copulation on the
stage!
Fully absorbed in the different versions of the play unfold
before me, I suddenly realized that the next and the last was ours. I shot out of the balcony and made a beeline
for the green-room. Ajitesh and the
others in our group were waiting for me to take my place, as I was the first to
enter the stage. I had my make-up and
costume already on.
We heard thunderous applause, when
Rajinder Nath’s version came to a close and the participants took the
curtain-call. When they exited the stage,
the stage-lights went out for the stage-hands to set the stage for our
version. As Rajendranath’s actors entered the green-room, there was a round of
hugging and whispered words of appreciation.
Then, absolute pin-drop silence in the green-room and we could hear
muffled sounds from the stage as the scene was being set for us. In less than a minute, the black-clad
stage-hands entered and their leader raised his hand to indicate that everything was ready for
us. Strangely, I was extremely calm, not
even the usual churning in the stomach every actor goes through, waiting in the
wings before entering the stage. I was watching Agitesh for his singnal for
our move. Unexpectedly, in the
semi-darkness of the green-room, I saw him come towards me. Without a word, he hugged me warmly and
patted me on the back. Then, I could
hear him take a deep breath
before his right hand shot up.
I picked up the single lit candle, stuck
on a small metal plate, and walked calmly with measured steps on to the stage,
followed by the other actors. I took my
place on the stacked up bricks, upstage centre.
The other actors took their places.
In the near-total darkness of the stage, I made sure that everyone had
taken his place. Then, I raised my head slowly
and looked up, the signal for the stage lights to fade-in slowly. I could mentally see the wooden handle of the
huge rheostat being heaved up slowly as the lights faded-in gently, when I was
to begin my lines, to synchronise with the pace of lights fading in on the
actors centre and down stage.
Then, to my utter horror, my mind went
blank! The moment every actor dreads to
face, I was facing now, literally, as I had only my face to face the
horror. I had to begin my lines
immediately, otherwise synchronisation with the stage-lights would be
lost. My mind was rummaging through my “memory”
at a furious pace for the opening lines.
I was sure, once I got the
opening lines, I would latch on to the following lines.
It was then the most unbelievable thing
happened! A gentle voice whispered into
my ear the opening lines: “And that is the crisis of the age..” in Hindi, “Yahee zamanei ka museebath hei”. I was stunned, but it was like manna from
Heaven!
During the rehearsals, I had begged
Ajitesh many times to give me a prompter, but he refused flatly, as he knew that that would make me
lax in learning my lines. Now I realized
that, without my knowledge, he had got a prompter ready to help me from the
wings!
Immediately, I opened my lines with a
gentle stage-voice: “Yahee zamanei ka museebath hei…” (Readers are requested to
forgive me, if my lines are infested with errors. Since I do not have the
script with me, I am “quoting” them from memory, after forty years since I
learned them.) At that moment the whole text
rushed back into my consciousness with rare clarity!
But, before I could say my next line
“Yeh museebath hamarei..”
I heard the prompter’s voice whisper them into my ears! I had no option but to follow the whispered
words! Again, before I could say the next lines, the voice whispered them into
my ears, and I had to follow that voice.
The voice was crystal clear, perfectly paced, and devoid of all emotions, as we had
intended it to be. But, I also observed that the voice sounded rather odd. Within a few minutes, I was able to identify
the oddity of the voice. It had a faint
trace of British accent! I was puzzled, but
immediately dismissed all thoughts about the prompter, to concentrate on my
role.
“Manushya ke jeevan….” as the
prompter’s voice went on and on, from line to line to line, I was reduced to
the status of a subservient voice, which began to annoy me increasingly, until
I was worked up to a state of fury, and waited for the play to end, to commit a
double murder!
Finally, when the play did end, we got
the longest and loudest standing ovation from the audience! When I took the curtain call alone, before
making the final exit, the audience went mad.
I was, however, most depressed.
Ajitesh and his moronic
prompter had robbed me of all my glory, which should have been solely mine!
In the green-room, everyone was hugging
and patting everyone else. Soon, a
stream of spectators from the auditorium poured into the green-room and started
shaking hands and congratulating everyone around, some of them unwittingly
congratulating each other!
When the milling crowd started to
disperse, I took Ajitesh aside to ask him how he could do this to me. He, however, hugged and patted me and said,
“You did it, you finally did it! You
were simply great!”
“Yes, thanks to your prompter, who
wouldn’t leave me alone, right through the play,” I retorted, somewhat calmed
down by then, but still palpably peeved.
“What?
What are you talking about?” asked Ajitesh, with a genuinely
uncomprehending look in his eyes.
I was even more annoyed now. “Sir, I am
grateful to you for getting me a prompter, but he should have been much less
intrusive. Anyway, I’d like to thank him
for his enthusiasm. Where is he and who
is he?” I was searching the room with my eyes.
Ajitesh was really puzzled now. “Dhanushji, I really don’t understand what
you are talking about. I never got a prompter for
you, because I knew from the start you would be great on the stage. And, by God, you were!”
Now, I was more perplexed, when I
realized that Ajitesh was not acting, but speaking the truth. I was also sure that I did hear the
prompter’s voice whispering into my ear, every word of my text.
*
We were to leave the next morning, after breakfast. I packed my things that night, after the
grand dinner party at the guest house
for all the participants and some invited Simla VIPs. My sleep, however, was restless that night.
I got up rather early the next day, around five,
to take another look, the last perhaps, at the magnificent snow-clad peaks of
the Himalayan range behind the guest
house. I stood there for nearly half an
hour and soaked myself fully in the splendour of the spectacle to my heart’s
content. Then I thought of taking a walk
to the Mall for the last time perhaps.
I took a slow walk, down and up the long road, taking in everything
around me, perhaps for the last time.
When I reached the Mall, I strolled around aimlessly for some time, when
I suddenly realized that my legs had taken me to the Gaiety Theatre. I approached it with a tinge of nostalgia,
which I usually develop very quickly for places I have been in. The gate was not locked, but the caretaker
was not to be seen anywhere. Perhaps he had gone out to have a cup of tea. I quietly slipped in and walked around the
building. I saw that the foyer was open but
the auditorium was locked.
I entered the foyer and walked around,
looking at everything there. There were
portraits on canvas of about a dozen English men and women. One of them attracted my attention. It was a full-figure portrait of an
Englishman in a vaguely familiar costume. He was lean and tall and had a regal
bearing. His face was extremely handsome
and his eyes were kind and gentle. I
strained my eyes to look at the inscription at the bottom, which read “Major David
Hume as Hamlet”. I stood there for quite a long time, admiring the actor and
the portrait. Then I decided it was time
I left, if I was not to miss my breakfast and the ride back to Delhi in the
rickety Ambassador. That was when
something caught my attention.
It was a modest marble slab, embedded
in the wall, next to the main entrance to the auditorium. I thought I would take a quick look at the
inscription, before I left. I walked
towards it and stood before it to read the inscription.
This The Gaiety Theatre
Is Dedicated to Major David
Hume
An Actor of
Extraordinary Talent and Humaneness
Who Suffered a Sudden
and Fatal Massive Cardiac Arrest
While Performing the
Role of Hamlet on this Stage
For the Most Exalted
Audience
Her Majesty Queen
Victoria
The Empress of India
On the 30th
of May
In the Year of Our Lord
1887
*
As the rickety Ambassador rolled down
the mountain road towards Delhi, I was completely at peace
with myself. Never before had I slept so soundly and
peacefully like a baby.
A.V. Dhanushkodi
May 2011
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