She lies alone on the bare stage upon a chair. Facing the audience, she’s suspended in a moment of ecstasy. The music builds slowly into a climax, like a wave, as her legs begin to move—soft at first, then swimming through the air, drowning in pleasure. At her crescendo, she reaches toward the audience, torn between wanting to stop it, resist it, yet hold on to this strange pain a little longer. Then, suddenly, the mood shifts—the score fades, the body stills, and she has broken up with her lover, not her ever present ‘Bhaiya’, her groomer.
This is Seconds Before Coming, a searing solo play by 26-year-old theatre artist Rishika Kaushik of Delhi. The one-woman performance follows an unnamed protagonist revisiting her past, trying to understand how childhood sexual grooming continues to shape her adult life. The play debuted at Oddbird Theatre in March to a standing ovation and returned for a second run this weekend. And for Kaushik, the play was far more personal, a confrontation with her own experience of sexual grooming as a child.
She first wrote the play as an essay for ‘The Third Eye’, powered by Nirantar Trust and their upcoming edition on Sexuality Through a Feminist Lens: On Pleasure & Danger. “Initially, I didn’t envision it as a play, but the team at Third Eye pushed me to explore how it felt in my body, beyond just form”, she says. “Once I had the story, they prompted me to consider what I could do with it.”
On stage, Kaushik shapeshifts. One moment she’s a woman narrating from the present, trying to make sense of her past; the next, she’s a 11-year-old girl she once was playing hide-and-seek, laughing nervously as Bhaiya enters the room. “I didn’t want to make something abrasive,” she says. “I wanted people to relate to it—not suffer through it, but feel held by it.” So, she leans into comedy and cracks jokes.
Even when talking about Bhaiya, her tone is warm. “He was tall like a tree,” she says with a smile. “I remember his sharp Adam’s apple.” The past doesn’t come in like a horror movie jump scare. It arrives softly, playfully. Familiar. That is its terror. “The body remembers,” she says. And that memory is slippery. Sometimes it feels like tenderness, sometimes it’s confusing. But it stays. This isn’t a play that explains what grooming is. It shows you how it feels. And how humour can be both shield and scalpel.
The scenography mirrors the emotional terrain — sparse with just a chair, a shirt, a tie, a lamp. Each item carries layered meaning, doubling as a fragment of memory. “I wanted to work with bareness, the simplicity was intentional,” says Kaushik. On the stage, the shirt becomes a pen, or the chair turns into a window or Bhaiya. “Each one can be deconstructed and reimagined,” she explains. “The shirt, the lamp that looks like a skirt, the lamp stand that doubles as a mic—it all scatters into memory.”
What remains
The play now exists inside her heart “like a heartbeat. I don’t know if it’s healed me, but I can now view it with more nuance”. She admits to her initial fear and hesitation in writing and performing it. “I didn’t know how much I could fictionalise, and how much I could reveal,” she says.
“I’m filled with trepidation every time I perform it. You never know if people will accept it or question it,” she adds. But the audience proved her wrong. “When the play began, the audience laughed... and my team in the tech box was in tears. We felt accepted.”
The play refuses easy binaries. “Child sexual abuse, is devious and manipulative in ways that don’t leave you. it complicates the way you dream or imagine love,” she explains. “Though brutal, the nature of sexual grooming can also be delicate, yet violently manipulative.”
She points to her own experience saying, “It wasn’t simply ‘this is abuse.’ It was tender; my body felt things, and I still live with that,” She grapples with the coexistence of pain and pleasure: “Both realities exist at once. So how do we understand our bodies and the pain and pleasure inside them together?”
Theatre as reckoning
Theatre, for Kaushik, became a space to wrestle with hard questions. “It gave me the greatest joy—it made me feel most alive,” she says. As a literature student in Delhi University, she joined the dramatics society, later exploring poetry and plays during her Masters in Hyderabad.
She returned to the stage during the pandemic through an international project, later training at The Drama School in Mumbai. Back in Delhi, she wrote and directed her first play, Love is a Potato Salad (2023), and in 2024, performed Spiral, a solo piece on how women navigate abuse directed by Mohit Mukherjee. Drawn to the intimacy of solo work, she cites influences like Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Jyoti Dogra. “There’s something about holding a room with just your body—it’s electric,” she says.
Now a rising presence in Delhi’s theatre scene, Kaushik finds the city fertile for experimentation. “It’s a smaller community, but full of possibility,” she says. “It’s a space full of exploration, with both seasoned artists and emerging voices.”
As both a director and performer, Kaushik hopes to create a space where vulnerability is embraced. “I’m interested in creating a space where we can come as we are, share our vulnerabilities, and take risks without fear,” she says. Though unsure of what a truly safe space looks like, she envisions one where “vulnerability feels exciting rather than devastating”.
Looking ahead, Kaushik adds, “if there’s a conflict I can’t resolve, that’s what excites me.” She says this in hopes of collaborating more and exploring unresolved questions through her work.