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When society is a cliche
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The play explored the subterranean vein of violence that throbs in South Asian societies
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The kindred often do worse than far strangers.
Thomas Kyd, Spanish Tragedy
As news of the Austrian engineer who locked up his own daughter and fathered seven children from her roils the genteel society, director Mala Pasha brought home another version of the violence that is being perpetrated in society disguised as family
values. Called Meri Kahani, written by Mehreen Poonja and Umbereen Inayet, the play was a slim plot that tells all the stories of immigrant women as they try to adapt in a strange society, try to blend in and more importantly discover who they are. It is a play about identities where people are forced to morph, modify due to societal pressures.
The cellphone rings at an English teaching agency, the excited caller communicates in halting English that she wants to talk to Miss Julia. Laced with Tamil words, she uses words like husband and hurt to make the audience aware that perhaps she is getting battered by her husband and she wants help.
The caller and the recipient are the thread which connect the various dots of intimate problems that the women face in an alien society where access to telephone is everything.
“Woh so gayi hogi aur kya karti hai din bhar,” the mother-in-law tells her son when he asks about his wife. The daughter keeps writing letters to her mother to explain her suffering, but instead of a kind word and a sympathetic shoulder, the stentorian mother explains the role of a daughter-in-law in a new house. Both the snide comments of the mother-in-law and the letters of mother make it clear to the woman who has two children (both girls) that the second marriage for the man is very much in the works if she doesn’t adjust.
The violence is shown from a child’s eye as six-year-old Mehek Arora playacted the scene where the father comes home and his wife spills the tea on him. The verbal violence is scary and much more disconcerting than the heavier stuff doled out later by more senior actors. It also showed how children see and internalise the violence they see.
Different preferences
However, the domestic violence is shown in a gratuitous way when an accented English speaking lesbian takes stage and lays bare her life from the time she became attracted towards a tomboyish independent girl in the school to the time she gets married and is trapped in a sexually violent marital life. The profanities that follow made the audience snigger rather than evoke revulsion about what society does to people for the sake of its mores.
Interloping into the play was the caller in Tamil who wanted to tell the violence at home.
The episode where a hijra takes centrestage was another gratuitous cliche except for the fact that it poked and prodded the question of identity seen through the sexual perspective. Cast in various roles Shilpa Shankar, Nafeessa Kassim and Sheela Mathews managed to bring home the level of intimacy and make a statement about the disturbing reality of South Asian communities.
SERISH NANISETTI
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