A table, two chairs, and a fluorescent hum — the stillness of a job interview is the last place one expects the past to come roaring back. Yet in Khachar Pakhi, presented by No Drama, Please! at Lamakaan, Banjara Hills, this quiet becomes the thin veil over a storm. The play opens in a room that seems ordinary, almost sterile. But within minutes, the air thickens. Memory stirs. Trauma presses in. And a woman finds herself confronting the very figure she had hoped to outrun for the rest of her life.
Written and directed by Dr Surendra Singh Negi, Khachar Pakhi is built not on linear storytelling but on fragmentation, rupture, and emotional dissonance. Negi calls it a post-dramatic theatre experience — one that doesn’t begin with a clear structure but evolves organically through exploration and performance.
He says, “It starts with an abstract idea. Gradually, the meaning emerges, the form shifts, and everything takes shape as the actors live through it.”
This evolving structure becomes a powerful mirror of trauma itself. Memories appear in flashes — sharp, blurred, dislocated — mimicking the way lived pain reenters consciousness: suddenly, incompletely, and often without permission. The protagonist moves between lucidity and collapse, between grounded presence and spiralling recollection. Time becomes elastic. Identity becomes unstable. The audience is pulled into a space where the past is not a closed chapter but a living, haunting force.
Negi did not create this world in isolation. He shaped it from nearly two decades of listening — to students, colleagues, friends, and the women in his own family.
Surendra reflects, “There are stories women carry that never leave them. Some days they function. On others, something triggers them — or nothing triggers them — and everything falls apart again.”
This uneven, unclear emotional territory is literally at the heart (no pun intended) of Khachar Pakhi. The title of the play is from Rabindranath Tagore, in which he discusses the metaphor of the caged bird and the free bird - a discussion about freedom/captivity/desire. Negi first heard of it years before even engaging in theatre when he was still a musician. The metaphor was always in his mind and resurfaced again a decade later as the conceptual spine of the play.
He says, “In the play, too, there is a dialogue. You may interpret them as people or as something less literal. But conflict and confinement remain constant.”
At Lamakaan, a venue known for its intimate, unvarnished theatre, the play demanded emotional presence from its audience. Negi doesn’t soften that expectation, as he shares, “It’s complex, multi-layered. No logic, no linearity. If someone comes looking for entertainment, this is not it. This story requires attention.”
The weight of the material stayed with him long after rehearsals ended. Writing took place in unpredictable places — while driving, walking, at times that should be normal. When one steps on stage, what takes place is not just a story but a confrontation with trauma, memory, with the disintegration and remaking of self.
Khachar Pakhi doesn’t offer closure. Instead, it insists that some stories, no matter how fragmented or painful, must be voiced.