Play: The Undertaker
Playwright: Loy Saldanha
Director: Preetam Koilpillai
Player: Abhishek Majumdar
My former boss, MJ Akbar, editor-in-chief of the Asian Age, apart from being a prodigious scholar on Kashmir in particular and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in general, is prone to quoting Urdu couplets at gatherings both formal and informal. In my limited interactions with him during my days as a reporter at the Asian Age, I’ve heard him quote the poet Mirza Ghalib at an editorial meeting held a day after our offices were ransacked by an enraged mob and much later, a few lines by Jahangir at a party held just after his book, Kashmir: Behind The Vale, was released. Those last lines in Pharsee, were Agar Firdaus bar ru-e zamin hast. Hami asto. Hami asto. Hami ast. The emperor Jahangir reportedly spoke those words when he first saw Kashmir. Exclaiming: ‘If there were Paradise on earth. It is here. It is here. It is here.’ Akbar used those lines as a forceful preamble to his description of what has become of Kashmir since the emperor first uttered the words.
Many years after that party, I heard those lines again; on stage at the Alliance Francaise in Bangalore last week. A dark, crouched figure, couched in loose, dirty garb spoke them, and this time, they seemed as a means to blaspheme Jahangir’s sacred memory of Kashmir. However, Abhishek Majumdar, who spoke those lines, and who plays The Undertaker in Loy Saldanha’s play of the same name, used the irony to predicate a deep personal betrayal rather than proclaim a political statement about the state of affairs in Kashmir or, consequently the state of Muslims in the troubled valley.
The Undertaker, who, in a period of less than an hour, lays bare his childhood, his youth and the turmoil that has shaped and defined his adult life, uses poetry often, and often to good effect, to construct for the audience, what he sees as a life of betrayal – betrayal by his father, by his mother, his friends, his lovers, and in a sense, by the religion he has so devoutly practiced.
The script, which, according to the director Preetam Koilpillai, differs significantly from the original, exacts an almost free-form performance from the actor. Though it has loneliness, dementia, impotence and rage as the ingredients that shape the central (and only performing) character on stage, it doesn’t really abide by a structure of a beginning, middle and end. Majumdar, who is both intense and arresting, switches back and forth between his childhood and the present while narrating his life as a man who has taken on the profession of burying the dead. During this narrative, he questions his father’s motives as a man charged with raising him as a boy, his German lover who seems to consume his already weakened personality, the corpse in the mortuary, and ultimately, in the final compelling moments of the performance, his God. He ends his performance with Urdu poetry, words that are his own: ‘Malik musafir se pooch raha, kuch hairan se nazar aate ho. Guzarte hue shahron se kuch pareshaan se nazar aate ho. Musafir malik se pooch raha, kyun bezaar ho maula. Yahaan se duniya dekho Allah. Har malik mamooli hai.’ (‘The Maker asks the traveller, you appear surprised by what you see while passing through these cities. The traveller asks the Maker, why do you appear disappointed with yourself. Look at the world from here. Where every God is ordinary’).
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