Fire arrives before language. A flare in the dark, the hiss of burning mashals, bodies emerging from shadow—and The Legend of Khasak is already underway. There is no neat beginning, no curtain rising to signal entry. Deepan Sivaraman’s staging of OV Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2025 in Panjim, Goa, unfolds the way a village night does: slowly, obliquely, revealing its secrets in fragments. The space feels less like a theatre and more like a clearing where stories have gathered for centuries. Soil lies exposed. Smoke drifts and refuses to settle. The air carries the smell of fire and sweat. Before a word is spoken, Khasak is present—tangible, breathing, watchful.
Performers move through the space with unhurried certainty, their feet brushing past the audience, silhouettes swelling and dissolving in firelight. The staging borrows from ritual rather than realism—echoes of Theyyam, folk processions, village ceremonies—where performance is not observed from a distance but absorbed through proximity. The audience is not seated safely outside the story; it is caught within its orbit.
When viewers enter the theatre, the air already feels heavy with the scent of wet earth and damp foliage, as if the monsoon has followed them indoors. The young teacher appears first—tentative, burdened, carrying the invisible weight of a troubled past. His movements are deliberate, measured, as though each footfall stirs the soul of the village itself. “The challenge was to make the characters both human and mythic,” explains director Deepan Sivarman. “Every hesitation, every glance, had to carry the stories of people both searching and haunted.”
The villagers emerge slowly, not as discrete individuals but as living fragments of the landscape. Their voices rise and fall in chants, murmurs, and half-remembered stories, threading themselves through the teacher’s journey. In one lingering scene, a villager cloaked in the shadows of a banyan tree recounts a tale of love, betrayal, and vengeance; the words drift through the theatre as if carried by wind. “It felt like the village itself was speaking,” says audience member Anjali Rao. “The air was alive with voices, with secrets I could almost reach out and touch.”
The ensemble moves with a fluidity that blurs the boundary between human and elemental. Limbs echo the sway of trees, bodies ripple like water, gestures harden into ritual. Magic realism—so central to Vijayan’s novel—finds vivid expression in every detail. A lamp’s flicker becomes ghostly fire. Shadows stretch unnaturally across walls. Whispers rise from unseen corners, telling stories of lives lived, lost, and half-forgotten. “It’s a world where the invisible becomes visible,” says Sivarman. “We wanted the audience to feel it in their bones, not just see it with their eyes.”
At its core, the young teacher’s journey remains a mirror held up to human introspection — burdened by guilt, yearning for understanding, suspended between reason and belief. The audience remains suspended between worlds, observing and participating at once. The characters from the play interact with the audience—sometimes screaming, sometimes cajoling.
The climax resists spectacle. Instead, it relies on the subtle interplay of light, sound, and movement. In the final moments, the teacher walks through mist and shadow, confronted by a chorus of villagers’ voices—fragments of ancient tales, whispered secrets, haunting melodies. There is no tidy resolution. The play ends in suspension, leaving viewers poised in a liminal space between the tangible and the imagined. “We wanted the audience to walk out feeling they had lived inside a story, not just watched one,” says the director. “Khasak is a world of contradictions—of beauty and melancholy, of life and myth. That is what we tried to capture.”