Actor Manav Kaul is as charming as the characters he is so loved for playing (who can forget his tragically beautiful turn as Kabir in the last segment of Ajeeb Daastaans?). In town last month for a showcase of his play Traasadi at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity in Anandapur, the actor wowed the audience again, simply because of the utter vulnerability with which he played his part.
Walking into a packed KCC Amphitheatre to first sit down and spend a few quiet moments with viewers before the play actually commenced, Kaul was as magnetic as ever — gentle and delicate in a heartbreaking sort of way while essaying the role of a man haunted by repentance. It is this quality of his that has had him winning hearts both on screen and on stage for the past many years; he has an uncanny ability to make you feel every ounce of his character’s pain, joy and longing, and, at the end, leave with a heart filled to overflowing.
The word ‘traasadi’, as Kaul tells us in one of those quiet moments before the play, is Hindi for ‘tragedy’. And while the tragedy of Traasadi is intangible on many levels, on many others it is a punch straight to the gut, a sharp yet familiar pain that demands to be felt. The name of Kaul’s character is Kopal, which means ‘tender sprout’ — a lot of the play has to do with the act of staying tender-hearted (or komal, as Kopal puts it) in a world that is harsh, that squelches dreams and snatches away individual agency.
The play is essentially feminist in the sense that it tells the story of a woman who is wronged through the eyes of her son, who grows from a naive, trusting, innocent child into a young man embittered by the way the world works, who gives in to patriarchal pressure and succumbs to social norms and constraints and starts to blame his mother for his inability to see the world through her eyes. A remarkable reflection on growing pains, the narrative hits close to home not only for adult women but also for anyone who has been witness to the way patriarchal society all but erases a woman’s identity completely.
One of the most moving sections in the story has the narrator recounting his mother’s sacrifices through the metaphor of — in her words — shops. She tells him she has run a number of shops all her life: Of being the ideal daughter, the ideal wife, the ideal mother, the ideal woman. After an unhappy marriage which leaves her to raise her child alone, Kopal’s mother gives up her dreams of writing stories; dreams she wouldn’t have the time for now, and which her husband hadn’t approved of anyway.
Her son, unaware of and unencumbered by the stigma that exists in the world, spends his days only too happy to come up with fantastical fairy tales for her — until the day comes when he is a child no more and is easily convinced of what the village says about his mother behind their backs. Believing his mother to be anything but ideal, he leaves, but not before making it abundantly clear that he is angry; and with his mother, above all else.
When the play opens, it has been two years since Kopal has seen his mother in person. News arrives that shatters him to the core and sends him rushing back home from his swanky job in Bombay, but his native village is no longer the same, his childhood friends are people he barely knows anymore, and his mother isn’t there to welcome him home. What remains is regret, repentance, and fragments of his life left behind; all of it buoyed by memories of his mother, and her iron will to stay komal, like a sprout; her will to stay tender-hearted and follow her own heart, despite, despite, despite.
Kaul is exemplary, his character’s emotions as real as yours or mine, almost reaching into you to bring forth a feeling that we often forget or choose not to bring forward — the act of bearing affinity towards our mothers; a feeling as universally complicated as the most fundamental of all human relationships that exist in this world. The final few moments of the play are especially moving, when Kopal reads aloud a poem at his mother’s pyre and crawls into a ball on the ground as the lights grow dim. The fact that there was absolute silence in the hall for a very long moment till Kaul brought his hands together in a gesture of thanks ought to tell you of the quiet yet immense impact his play had on the audience, if this piece hasn’t already.
