As the brooding, doting father, Tandon recounts how Xenia, who was so full of zest, wore a blue dress for her ninth birthday.The five stories rendered the audience numb and made them laugh in alternation. What ensues is a moment of serendipity that leaves the writer and the audience bemused. When Bimla’s father sees her lifeless body, he bawls and cries, only to pick up the scythe and embark on his own revenge, demonstrating the meaningless yet vicious circle of violence. Yet the author just can’t seem to get it right.. Likewise, I found myself swinging between extreme emotions of despair, anger and sorrow on the one hand, and laughter and amusement on the other. While the stories were short, they are rich and intense.” as he watches the car keys tinkling in his driver’s hand, who dressed in white, appears like a ghostly apparition to the writer. The stories are deliberately left open-ended, to engage the audience and force them to think. But the father has to take the most difficult decision of his life — to allow doctors to remove his 10-year-old daughter from life support.Shankar as an unsure, nervous teacher does well to show the conversation one has with oneself. The vision inspires Alam to get back to his writing table, stick to it for four days.In Sharifan, by Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Tom Alter narrates a story of vengeance.Directed by Sujata Soni Bali, Once Upon a Time is a play in Hinglish that tells five short stories, episodically. He broods over how he was late for the party and how Xenia impatiently ran towards him as soon as she saw him, and got hit by a speeding car. His 10-second performance of expressing shock and then gathering himself to avenge with bloodshot eyes is scary. This time the driver, knowing what would interest his patron, passes by the same building.Alter’s chaste Urdu makes him the perfect fit for the role of an impetuous writer-lover.While sitting in the car, Alam saab encounters his muse clothed in “lal, kala aur safed”, fresh out of a bath, to dry her hair in the balcony. The ensemble of stories in Once Upon a Time deal with unqualified rage, nervousness, rib-tickling humour, the pain of loss and the thrill of finding China Jacquard Rugs inspiration in the most unexpected places, without passing a judgment. The Last Letter by Dipanker Mukherjee keeps us suspended in a different emotional space. Written by different authors, no two stories share the same setting, tone or narration. More than the story, it is Shankar who drives the segment with her performance. Twinkle Pandey’s Twenty Questions is an amusing story about a boy and a girl meeting for an arranged marriage. Her expressions are more articulate than words.
This one was a sweet, light-hearted act where Shankar’s performance as a psychiatrist is charming.As the lights fade out, the next story begins.Alter and Tandon bring in their experience while Shankar’s presence lights up the stage.The last story, Ek Lamha, written and enacted by Alter, based on a real-life incident, is about a poet struggling with writer’s block and how he overcomes it, by finding his muse amidst the bustle of highway traffic, standing on the 10th floor balcony of a high-rise. She constantly talks to herself, expressing doubt and then reassuring herself by remembering that she was a topper and doesn’t need to worry.The fact that there were no breaks between the acts also help set the pace of the one-hour play. Tandon, as the father of the Hindu girl, is very effective. He depicts the anxiety and restlessness of a poet so well that one’s heart reaches out to him. The questions they ask each other and the asides attached to their responses sent the audience into peels of laughter.Alter’s body language is tense with toes pointed as he sits narrating the story. It is clear that something sinister is afoot when he talks about a father’s angst on seeing his daughter Sharifan’s dull, lifeless, naked body after she was raped amidst a communal flare up. I would definitely like to watch her more. His powerful monologue, and repetition of words while he describes the body of his daughter Sharifan, immediately show the audience the spectre of violence and mayhem where emotion rules and reason and rationale are mute spectators, just as Alter does when he watches Tandon mourn the death of his daughter. It’s a hilarious and breezy story. Each story stands out from the other, and yet they are all connected.. And on a lark the author decides to call on his muse. Alam saab (played by Alter) laments, “Shayari bhi kya khoob cheez hai. I was floored by her vivaciousness without which the act could have been dull.The audience decide for themselves.As one reflects on the first story, two schoolchildren playing in a classroom appear in the aisle, next to the audience, communicating in signs, transporting us to the second story adapted from Sutapa Basu’s Classroom Wiles, about an English teacher’s first day at a school. “Maar dalunga!” The narrator intonates the father’s blood-curdling cry as he sets out to avenge his daughter’s rape, a scythe in hand.. The father talks about his child’s drawings, her crooked art strokes and in a poignant request asks Xenia to draw a crooked line on the life support monitor, and give him hope. Stuck again, for want of the perfect expression, Alam goes out on another drive. Starting with cliched questions like what they like to read, what kind of music they listen to and eventually arriving at the conclusion that the two have nothing in common, the protagonists played by Tandon and Shankar give into the cliche of “opposites attract”. Eventually, he chances upon a door, breaks it down and rapes 14-year-old Bimla, who inhabits the house. Alam saab asks the driver to take him to a new place, to take his mind off things which could maybe help him start his writing afresh. He moves slowly across the stage, internalising the character and the pain and grief he feels as Sharifan’s father.From the classroom, the third segment takes us to the story of a father’s last letter to his daughter. Also, the background music helps her as she goes into the world of literature, making a rowdy bunch of students go quiet and then fall asleep. Initially, it seems the father is writing to his daughter as he nears the end of his life. On regaining his senses, he realises that the girl is dead.Delhiites experienced a myriad range of emotions on Sunday as actors Tom Alter, Sunit Tandon and Charu Shankar took to the stage to enact Miran Productions’ Once Upon a Time at the India Habitat Centre to a full house
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