HYDERABAD: It’s been 15 years and what I am still living is endless memories of dwelling with her, she running to the door of my house on my return after long, of what followed after an eventful night and the secrets she kept buried through the many years of our matrimony.”
The play Dedh Inch Upar, based on celebrated Hindi author Nirmal Verma’s monologue with the same title, presented by Ekansh Theatre on a rainy Thursday evening in Lamakaan began with a man drinking in a bar in Germany and talking to people (fictitious characters) about the endless thoughts and memories that create a frenzy in his internal world. Nirmal Verma’s writing always deal with incredible details of the inner world of the characters. Similar was his passionate writing about alcohol, and how it associates with the culture of far off countries.
Next, the old man sipping his beer, looks shattered. He laments that before she was taken in custody by the Nazis for having found to be hiding Anti-Nazi literature in her house, she never showed him even a glimpse of an another world she was living.
The protagonist then admits that the night the Nazis broke into their house and took her away, he had searched all her things like a spy despite knowing she will never come back. He then runs to look at her remains in the house like a madman and goes back to remember the police atrocities he underwent after her death.
“They kept on asking me about her hidden missions. After all, it was World War II in Germany. But more than the days of inhuman atrocities I underwent in custody, I am grieved thinking that maybe she kept lying to me and everyone and living so much all alone only to protect me. That makes me bend before her,” he said.
Then, another dialogue reflecting the vividity of Verma’s writing says, “Women are like cats. We don’t know everything about them. We don’t.” While the audience drowns in his pain and love he still feels for his long lost wife, they suddenly see him vigorously rotating on his chair and break his beer glass.
The play also goes on to question autocracy, something usually reflected in Verma’s literature. The old man gasps for life and says until you see someone dying you have a hope left that they are alive and will be waiting for you at home when you return.
Amar Sankrit from Jamshedpur who played the old man’s role in the play told Express, “In the play, minutely, the protagonist’s anger on his wife’s secrets also hints on the “why”..that maybe she didn’t share those things with him because maybe he never understood her completely. Many men don’t make an effort to understand women and when they don’t, they sometimes even end up finding solace in another woman. This happens in every society across the world and Verma has somewhere brought this out in a subtle way through this monologue.”