The new play written and directed by Manav Kaul, titled Chuhal , comes equipped with a full-blown thematic overture featuring a file of transfixed women with beguiling, plaintive eyes. A man (Atul Rastogi) hovers around them, always on tenterhooks, not knowing how to engage with the remarkable poise of their motionless forms, even as they begin to quietly oscillate in their spots. The music is the middle movement from Bach’s stirring ‘Concerto No. 5’, and its melancholic strains appear to fit in quite snugly with the play’s small-town ethos, in which winter wear is such a feature. Colourful pullovers, tasteful stoles and a tidy waistcoat or two evoke the chilliness, and warmth, of buttoned-down living. It is a short prelude, but it carries the traces of Kaul’s signature style that breathes such life and spirit into his own scripts. As overtures go, it appears to set up an intriguing premise.
Kaul plays a schoolteacher, Sudhir, doing the rounds of provincial homes — giddily breezy sister (Srishti Shrivastava) in tow — looking for brides. One such prospect, Aarti (Sugandha Garg), turns him down quite firmly, but with warmth and empathy, and thus, rather predictably, begins another love story founded upon unrequited affection. Of course, it would have to be Aarti’s free-spiritedness that makes her such a contrast to the cloistered women that Sudhir must encounter all the time. Of course, it would be his own simple-minded guilelessness that allows the reticent Aarti to warm up to him. It is a disconcerting if classic imbalance, but the tale quickly leads to other notions of kinship that are perhaps not quite as typical, given the milieu in which Kaul situates his characters. This is suggested in the title, a riff on chuhalbaazi , a colloquialism that implies a kind of playful banter.
Her world cast in pastel shades, Garg, in a rare theatre outing for a talented indie actor, brings a quiet dignity and a contemplative quality to the conservatively attired but progressive Aarti. She is averse to commitment, but eager to engage with the men in her life without being shackled down by boring convention. It is an exciting part, but handicapped by Aarti’s all-knowing demeanour. In a script peppered with beautifully written lines, the romantic interludes between Aarti and Sudhir seem premeditated, lacking the spontaneity of true discovery. The distance between them remains staggering. They negotiate an uncertain turf with role-play and role reversals. The latter seems like a device to place the writer’s preoccupations with the feminine gaze centrestage. The former results in some interesting set-pieces that could have opened up a Pandora’s box of possibilities if the play had pushed the envelope far enough.
Implicit to this is the idea that the identities we carry within can open us up to an infinite unknown, allowing for multiple levels of engagement. Each encounter exists in the here and now, ephemeral to the touch, but much more alive than anything we might encounter in our prescribed lives. In one interlude, Sudhir is a silver-haired professor (Tarun Kumar), and Aarti is a young limpid-eyed ingénue (Amrita Bagchi), or perhaps, it is vice versa. These personas are just receptacles which allow the vagrant lovers to engage in wish-fulfilling escapades, where the grimier aspects of human nature can be revealed and revelled in. Yet, Chuhal never ventures beyond saccharine comfort. The engagements remain chaste and in resolute water-colour territory. An otherwise well-orchestrated final sequence presents Chuhal as a radical idea whose time has come, but this is only relative to Kaul’s own entrenched conservatism.
Shrivastava’s effervescent turn, even in an underwritten part, gives hope for an alternative turn of affairs. As the young woman Nimmi, firmly wedded to the status quo, Shrivastava is funny, wistful, endearing and a scene-stealer if ever there was one. If Sudhir can be afforded an escape from his embittered masculinity, perhaps Nimmi could have been a better conduit for the play’s journey than the omniscient Aarti, who seems to have already negotiated her contradictions when we arrive at her doorstep. Audiences need surrogates, but not of the hand-holding kind. Chuhal is wonderfully lit and beautifully visualised and there are good performances all around, but as an experiment of ideas, it certainly has some distance to go.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
