And he ungrew with a Cap…
What’s art and his keeper got in common, but the shared derision for the anal brain. #taleunfolds
She’s been waiting for the bus for near about an hour, eyes hovering over the digital clock ticking away to the glory of bits and bytes on her phone with her hand tapping and indecisive whether to give up and call a cab. Indecisive because who knew when she’d reach if…for this was the city of rush-hour traffic only 24/7, with its streets seldom devoid of the machine ants.
No, she’ll wait, at least the bus won’t cost as much.
*5 Minutes later* one could see the frustration on the young girl’s face as the 3rd driver cancelled on her, just as well, she thought, finally the right bus was looming from the tricky curve she’d walked past an hour back.
A few missteps and roundabouts later, she was finally sitting in a basement, artsy and pretty but still a dingy underground floor in a house located squarely in the make-believe world of residential societies, and this had given her the creeps well before she’d reached the confusing turns/treasure hunt that google maps had her execute.
As she tried to catch one of the throw-cushions the host was flinging to the general direction of people, sitting chattily away from the stage.
She was wondering what new form of abstraction she’ll be subjected to today. The last 2 plays had been baffling to say the least…to think she’d thought Kafka was some type of new harem pants… And who knew when they said contemporary interpretation of Ramayana (the epic she thought she remembered enough to sign up for this) there were zombies and gorillas going to be added to the buffet?
The man who’d been sitting next to her, was now keenly attuned to her mumblings and she could see a brow of amazement, from the corner of her eyes, slowly go up with each unintended syllable she uttered in/during her musings.
Finally someone rang the bell to shush out everyone, signalling the end of a multitude of catching-up silos that were slow on the uptake when it came to Etiquette of the audience for a drama. You could see some rustling behind the makeshift curtain, tugged intermittently by busy hands annoyed at its peekaboo behavior. She’d been worried till now… what if this turned out to be yet another regional language production? She was barely hanging on to her resolve not to shift states after the regular babble with the auto-guys. But then again, she sighed, what could she really do, she was here, some 15 km away from her lil bed of heaven, and plus this event was free. Worse comes to worse she’ll bail!
On an afterthought, bailing from the first seat would be quite the trip… down that big room full with families on their sunday-outing, and ol toothless grandmas rubbing rheumatic joints on the down-low, with a few drama-lovers (both of the art and the trouble) speckled here and there.
Suddenly a figure slid out of the corners of the stage, surprising/blindsiding the ones who had their eyes pegged at the curtain hustlers in the middle. The guise was peculiar, a red turban drawn with a dexterity that suggested a complete lack of giving a damn when it came to turban-sensibilities of the old, as heard from neighboring aunties at the back. The slender and mostly hidden neck was studded with fake but sober pearls, the kind you saw in olden movies with the sepia/grayscale tint. As the eyes took over control from the frontal cortex, the silly but strikingly colored dhoti brought forth questions, where did HE get them? do free drama performances have their own stylists? Is it retail-friendly?
Her ex-job as a serial shopper came back to haunt her… She’d scouted attires and looks for enough soap actors to know things like ‘the elbow slimming cut’, and from all that drama off-screen as well as on, she’d said her goodbyes some 5 months back, but the triggers still popped up every now and then, nonetheless, she took a backhanded selfie on her ancient phone with as much zoom as the poor bugger would allow, till her thumb looked like some giant blurry mysterious appendage in the frame and all the focus was mustered up on the now-grainy and slightly distorted piece of clothing, which wouldn’t be fathomable to anyone but her trustworthy disciple she knew, as she repeatedly pressed send on this blackberry monstrosity. The man next to her scooted a lil to the other side. Great.
The junior she had trained was currently handling all her social media, and granted, she hadn’t asked her to but nonetheless she was quite grateful, especially since the last time she didn’t respond to insta requests for a day, some fool actually called up the police. And the cyber cell department. Needless to say, they didn’t entertain him… until, he posted their ‘inaction status’ on his brother’s twitter account which just happened to gain enough traction for it to become a verified account… and then. Well, the ‘@MumbaiPolice found @atrociousBlouse alive and well’ post accompanied with my tagged photo garnered pretty much zero responses if you discount a few smiling emojis and reactions but resulted in a content happy fan.
Looking back at the stage, she saw the host end her sermon on the poignant-ness of today’s non-event event, and how she’d be mock-annoyed if anyone posted this online, keeping with the theme of their artsy and incomprehensible ways. The man was back on stage after having been taken away from it post the brief introduction. As she tried to look for the word describing the thing on his chest, ahaa chain-mail, she came across ‘panoply’. The images that google supplied her with were of beautiful women posing at angles she couldn’t care less for, but the shiny armor on the man’s breast was everything in comparison to the makeshift one made out of braided rucksack that the fella up in front was sporting. She’d remembered her days of slumming it during fashion school, those eclectic beads she wore with pretty much everything and almost wanted to leap on stage call for a short break of 4 hours and transform this slinky middle-aged man into the dashing brooding gentleman she knew he could be with a lil well-placed henna on those grays. But just as she was about to be lost in makeover dreams that she had promised herself to stay away from, an abrupt pain in the back of her head was followed briefly by a mumbled sorry, she looked back as the shin belonging to another hipster idiot of the current generation made its way to the other side of the room following more lazy sorry’s and assaults on innocent folks like her during its way. As she got back to the world of the living, her pity for the struggling old timer on stage was transformed into utter confusion as she spied a pair of beautiful jooties she’d had to let go of during her last scoop because of their price tag.
Tuning in to his performance, her curiosity peaked as she realized, the performance was indeed in Hindi. Or a cross between Sanskrit and Hindi, as her rusty ears tried to take in the familiarly strange words and make sense out of them.
The man looked like a veteran, and she was just enough far gone into his performance to know that she needed to start blinking…and so did he. While the dress had its merits, she’d started reading upon the minute gestures, the sublimities that apparently her kind was always blind to. Since this was a single-man-performing, a mono-performance was it called? You were looking at multiple characters being portrayed by the same man, from the wife to the villain. Which was funny, since Duryodhan had always been the baddie in her eyes, and not to mention, the overzealous PD back at Film City. The conversation on this set, though, conveyed things differently.
The drama was what was promised to the audience, but what was this really? This one man was stripping the epic, dialogue by dialogue of its black and white frames. Dharamsankat, that’s the word along with dharma productions, which came to her mind as the artist took her by the hands and placed her squarely into the shoes of Karna while slipping out of the ones by Kunti. The decisions were fuck-all. There was no right answer really. The swirling mass of characters, molding into one another, begging, suggesting and above all being their version of ‘righteous’, had her staring in consternation, at some particle in the air trying hard to understand.
With a sudden leap into the nearby air, the man onstage brought her eyes back to him, he was energetic for his age, she could sense that, sprightly was probably the word. The war had now started, it should have started back home too, she sat back as the recantation of the Mahabharata war now claimed everyone’s imagination. The missus would have found out by now, she nodded, none-too-thoughtfully. Her latest collection, a parting gift to the witch who’d not only changed the affairs of her bank statement but also her life. Though the drama had ended for her, the one on stage had just started.
After about 20 minutes into the thing, she’d stopped eye contact, in fact she was staring at his lean mean chest as it hefted from deep within another prose like rejoinder to the anti-hero from the voice of the definite hero. In her defense, she wasn’t ogling him for his stud value (which wasn’t much to begin with), one couldn’t constantly look at eyes that just didn’t blink! What was wrong with him! He’s a method performer, a sage voice perturbed from somewhere behind. Abbey screw that! When did normal eye function get in the way of performance? She retorted back, to the frustration of her now annoyed neighbor. As the man on stage changed hides, mental hides if not physical clothes, she marveled at his prowess. How could that deep brooding baritone change with such abrupt measure into a woman’s soft screech for justice, without sounding like a drag queen audition? How many years of sacrifice to ‘the craft’, if sacrifice you have to call it, would it have taken to get to this point of androgynous-ness of movement and words.
The annoyed neighbor hummed when she wowed mutely at the pain one could see in the features of the old sadhu, now begging for alms like he hadn’t been a thunderous king just a second before. If the pity for the pious beggar didn’t make you stand up, the dying man’s eyes almost got a few phones lit up in readiness to call an ambulance, of course, she knew it was not real. But the very tragedy lay in the fact that she’d seen less sentiment in real emotions. The people shining in their ineptitude, the mediocrity of their work bringing accolades from thousands of other likely fools, that’s what was stoking the anger in the pit of her stomach right now, the anger dying quickly as it came to life, with a familiar fear suffocating it as he finally changed into some background character so eerily similar to the one she’d been running away from for nigh about an year now.
Ironically, while one’s degree in the field of fashion amounts to very little by way of their sense, their fashion sense was in essence only valued as a side opinion by nasty designers once this so-called education stamp was visible from afar on a 4 by 4 piece of fancy paper. This had been the bane of her existence for quite some time as quitting fashion school mid-way had transformed her into a successful social leper. She’d no choice at the time, and she still maintained that. Yes, she hadn’t been able to pick up a pencil without flinging it back at some tapestried closet at the serial’s set, her almost permanent housing. Yes, she knew every creator didn’t necessarily need to go the typical way, but… there was still room for movement. Her team had started taking over almost all the tasks she took glee in and all she was there for was signing the cheques, the contracts and look valuable plus a bit formidable at the negotiation meetings, because yes, her manager asserted she needed those. From the spike in her yearly numbers, she couldn’t disagree with him keeping a straight face.
As the final round of brand promotion started, with all the applause and acknowledgement rounds taking front seat (the sponsors were actually obliged to stand up from theirs), she looked upwards, and wondered if she’d skipped a few steps. A few brain cells for sure were missing now thanks to the audience clapping in that sonorous basement. The view above didn’t give any solutions either, neither to the mystery of the echoing adulation nor to her predicament of a bag full of first-world problems.
As the lithe man came back on stage for the final curtain call, and the host uncharmingly listed out his many brow-raising achievements, while clapping him on the back like one does to their doted nephew, you could see a little flicker from the genuine smile on his face. Or maybe she’d gone loopy and started making up stories where there were none to be had. The woman happily tittered away about a backstage greeting, that the patrons could now subject the artist to, as he would be standing just next to the exit doors along with the rest of the pretty people brigade. Shit.
She’d been mesmerized before but was now mostly embarrassed at her new-found crush on the first ‘real’ actor she’d come across, and that too a guy probably in his late 40s. For someone who’d seen her share of actors and their crocodile tears a la glycerin, she could definitely live without ever seeing him again. Her mind bubbled as she strained her feet to look above the line that had now formed near the exit, with the acclaimed actor at the helm probably chugging diet green tea after his pro-bono act had ticked off his good Samaritan checkbox for this month. She wondered if the checklist would also accommodate, soothing flustered fan-girls, ahem fan-women?
Just as the stupid hipster came back in her peripheral vision with his snapping turtles in the name of feet, she harrumphed at the loss of chivalry and general courtesy in this world, and the blessed line finally moved forward. She was just about to search for something and get her phone out, when she remembered the current model number and decided upon an old school autograph instead.
While rolling the piece of paper around the pen, the sight that met her unblinking eyes (ahhaa!) was not of a middle-aged probably senior citizen-ish artist standing ahead, but the guy from earlier was fast disappearing as the grey paint slowly came off of the beard at each rub of awkwardness probably from the bravos and shaabaash beta’s (congrats kiddo!’s) that were coming his way. Moreover the turban was nowhere to be seen, the chain mail was now ensconced in a Super Dry sweat-shirt, the dude was still playing with the jacket’s zipper, every two thrashings on the back. The dhoti was replaced by burgundy Bermuda’s but the jooties had stayed.
What really ticked her off was the removal of a single kundan (gold earring) making him look like…no, nope the eyes were still the kind she could drown into, she withdrew abruptly as the gentleman, three people ahead of her gave way to hearty laughter for reasons unknown to her befuddled brain. The hands went to smoothen the hair and replaced the cap upon a head which she was used to seeing keeping company with tardy turbans. As her feet moved forward, she gave way to her initial misgivings, and just as the greet-group was joined by the snapping-turtle-feet hipster, she realized something, the great artist was also just that, a hipster dude. He’d somehow ungrew with a cap, losing years of wisdom and unfairly her respect with each shuffle of his jooties.
The angry neighbor called out to her without effect, as she walked away after mumbling something along the lines of an inspired performance, the families discussing the housing market were ringing dead on her ears that were hot with… something akin to a light version of betrayal.
Her brain was fighting battles about the genuineness of her admiration. While one side claimed him to be an over-lauded young thug of a fool just like her, the other side reminded her of the multi-layered talent that she’d professed to be infatuated with, just over 10 minutes ago.
The darkness had hushed out most of the subdued conversations as kids noisily tugged on their mother’s hands while evidently standing in wait for the car just around the now-busy corner. As the last of the organizers went pillow hunting, the A-team of sneakers and one lone hooded jootie came around talking about the latest marvel from the house of Marvel Universe. She busied herself with the zooming and un-zooming of the map on her phone detailing the driver’s location uselessly as the phone trilled non-stop with a bombardment of frantic messages typed down by hands that seldom expressed any emotions other than punching off expressive emoticons.
She’d unconsciously been listening to the young group’s plans and was almost ready to look at the messages from the now-furious mentor, when a sudden tap on her shoulder was followed in succession with a call from the very devil she’d been running from for some 1000 kms. Her brain took a second but as her body turned back, she realized that her benefactor into the current distraction wore a cap that she’ll probably remember for quite some time.
The smile did her in. The annoyed neighbor standing right next to the hipster actor was droning on about some plans, and as she looked back to her phone from the man and back again, she smiled in relief. Seems they’d taken the smile as a yes and they all started moving to the nearest vehicle. The annoyed neighbor griped about the distance to the nearest watering hole and she couldn’t help and remark how residential places gave her the creeps. A couple chuckled while most amen’ed to that while getting inside the pseudo-SUV. The call had long gone to voicemail and she was sure something nasty was being recorded on that voice message but for today she’ll chug the past away and live, just as she’d planned to, like a regular 27 year old. And who knows maybe the man with the jooties, will tell her his secret to un-ageing as the night went on, she thought as they shared a small grin over snapping-turtle-feet hipster’s unintended joke.
