The girls tell their names. The name of flowers? 

Theatre as cinema. A celebration of visual aesthetics. Music, folk, modern, classical — in synthesis with the brilliant performances of the artists. All young. Gifted. Superbly talented. Enacted by the students of  NSD third year, and directed by great theatre director Neelam Man Singh, ‘Lemon Soda’, will stay inside your heart. For a long, long time 

By Amit Sengupta

Lemon Soda. 

The girl loves the lemony after-taste in the lemon soda. Sometimes sweet. Sometimes sour. Like life. A sort of synthesis.

The boy loves the soda. Not the lemony lemon. Neither sweet. Nor sour. Only fizz. Or, the metaphysical idea of fizz.

And then, suddenly, they all arrived from inside the darkness. 

Beautiful young men and beautiful young women. 

In a little theatre in the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi, with a moving stage in the middle, surrounded by a rapt audience. They all arrived. Like a luminescent revelation. From within the darkness.

Like butterflies dressed in splendid, kaleidoscopic, rainbow colours. Petals. Bark and autumn leaves. Buds and flowers. Falling leaves. Yellow. Maroon. Vermilion. Purple. Green like a pristine meadow.

Moonshine. Moon tide. Moon shadow. Half-moon shadow.  Full moon tide. The sea, in abject madness, rising just after midnight to touch the moon. The madness of love and longing, unrequited. Unfulfilled. Always.

They  are wearing lipstick, the girls. Smiling and laughing. The boys are dandily dressed. They don’t care a damn for anything. Walking, no, floating, as if flying on the wings of desire! Optimism. Not waiting for revelations. Life is a zone of possibilities.  

Some of them look at the mirror and powder their faces. They are throwing flying kisses too. Welcome to this epic theatre, they seem to be saying. In this age when the tyranny of mediocrity calls the shots, thanks for coming.  

Please. Don’t go away!

Lemon Soda. Short stories by Sadaat Hasan Manto. Perhaps one of the greatest short story writers in the history of world literature. Tortured, hounded, solitary. Exiled in his own, imagined homeland.

Neelam Man Singh. Perhaps one of the greatest theatre directors in the history of world and Indian theatre. Still celebrating her special magic on the stage — sublime, miraculous, strategic. 

Theatre as cinema. Theatre which resurrects your stagnant senses. Smell. Fragrance. The skin of the body. The hair on the hands. The smell of the skin.

Stories within stories. Fingers within fingers. Eyes looking into eyes.

Senses. Almost all the senses. They suddenly awaken like forgotten, invisible, buried ruins in a ravaged landscape. They fill your body and mind with a mysterious, sharp energy, something no addiction can ever do. Not even Single Malt. Or, heady Mohua, around a fire, in the remote forests of the Central Provinces of India, where the adivasis have lived for centuries. Senses. Almost all the senses.

Sound. Especially, the sense of sound.

Gaze. Especially, the sense of gaze. 

Theatre as cinema. A celebration of visual aesthetics. Music, folk, modern, oral traditions, old cinema, new cinema, classical — in synthesis with the incredible performances of the artists. All young. Gifted. Superbly talented. Blending a sublime synthesis of brilliance and hard work, often so restrained and controlled, that you choke with despair. 

Students of  third year in NSD, I am told. Salute!

Often, like a cacophony. Or a scream of despair — which echoes through time and space, across the lanes and bylanes of moffusil mohallas, beyond the railway tracks, across the terraces of small towns intertwined with each other, where, once upon a time, lovers would exchange quick glances on hot, eerie, summer afternoons, and, if possible, sudden, spontaneous, seductive caresses.

‘The Scream’, like that horrible moment in the grotesque painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, made in 1893. And, then, after the scream, silence.

All that remains is the smoke rolling in the space; tobacco smoke, curling from the lips of the young woman artist, smelling of lost substances and memories.

On earth, a little desert of sand, a square pool of water, the imagined homeland of ordinary folks. Before and during the Partition of India. A trunk. An empty trunk? Symbolic of all the precious possessions you can collect in one lifetime. 

Two girls, lost in a world of polarized bloodshed, violent, repeated, relentless assaults on women, men with a black mask covering their faces, screams, dark smoke, death and dying, vicious vengeance in the vicious air, bitter with infinite injustice and infinite sorrow. 

A fierce darkness at noon.

Two girls. What are their names? So, what is their identity? Religion? Caste? Community? What is their father’s name? Is he a good father, or, is he a bad father? Whatever happened to the mother, the daughter, the sister in the method in this madness? 

The girls tell their names. The name of flowers? So, from which geography of hate do flowers grow? No, they grow from the rain-soaked earth of nature, carrying that exotic smell of a parched earth after being soaked with the first rain. The scent of a flower. And flowers have no countries.

Hence these girls, named after flowers by their own selves, beyond religion and identity, lost and marooned in their own land, tell their stories. There are two packets of biscuits in one of their stories. In another story, there is a dark room, locked from outside by her own father. Screams. The voice of her father. And a trickle of blood, which can be seen flowing from below the crack in the door.

Two sisters are having a nice time in the market. The little sister wants this and that. The elder sister is too happy to get her this and that. The bonding between sisters. They are eating biscuits. They are happy.

Suddenly, there is chaos. The same predictable pattern which follows the same, damned, politics of hate! 

The little one disappears.

Men with black masks. The father with a black mask. The slow trickle of blood under the door.

They eat biscuits, the two girls named after flowers. The elder sister, suddenly, sees the other girl eating the same biscuits. The same biscuits? Yes, which she and her little sister were eating moments before she disappeared! 

How and where did you get this from?

My father gave it to me. The man with a black mask.

The scream. And, then, silence.

Only the maestro, who plays the saxophone, takes over the stage. As the two flowers hold each other,  now comrades-in-arms, like a falling tree in a mad storm, in abject despair. The music of the saxophone rises into the sky and stars, and stays, deep inside our intestines, our nervous system, our eyelids, eyes, fingers, limbs. It refuses to go away.

As the stage goes round and round. Earth, sand, wood, water. Cold meat. Thanda gosht. 

A young Muslim and Hindu, who hate their work — carrying dead bodies in their cart — end up fighting with each other. They reconcile. 

Sometimes, alcohol flows from the sky. They run to collect it in their cart. Gulp the liquid down. It soon turns into blood.

There is nothing permanent in life.  All is ephemeral. Biscuits. A trickle of blood. The scream. Flowers. Empty trunks.

However, colours come back. Like rainbows. Like the four seasons of Vivaldi. A marriage ceremony, perhaps. The finale. Joy fills the circular motion of song and dance. Food is being cooked in huge utensils. Sweets are being shared. Hot tea in small glasses are shared. They are dressed in pulsating colours. Men and women. Girls and boys. Young and old. There is a smile on their faces. 

The joyful music sounds like that of a local marriage band. It’s like a painting, this last scene, in motion, and in perfect stillness. A painting crafted on celluloid, now, on  a stage in a little theatre, which goes round and round! 

‘Lemon Soda’, an adaptation of short stories by Sadaat Hasan Manto was staged to a packed audience at the Bahumukhi Theatre at the National School of Drama in Delhi. The play is directed by Chandigarh-based theatre artist, Neelam Man Singh. 

All pictures clicked from the display board at NSD.