I recently spent four days in Delhi performing a play with theatre stalwarts Shubhrajyoti Barat and Kumud Mishra. As is the norm, there were many conversations over coffee (before the show, over whisky after) about theatre. I thought to myself that I was gathering great fodder for this article. But bang in the middle of the trip, tragedy struck, and I’m pushing all that I gleaned from those two people to next month. A 65-year-old man named Rama Gowda breathed his last, and I’m going to go as far as saying that Mumbai Theatre lost a permanent fixture and a shining star.
Among the many moving eulogies, one was by Ali Fazal, who quite rightly began, “Not many people will know him, but then many people did.”
So who was Rama Gowda? For the past decade he was the undesignated production manager of my theatre group.
Finding his space
He came on board to work for us, but it wasn’t long before we were working for him. He went swiftly from cleaning the godown to becoming its fierce guardian, from negotiating with tempo drivers to owning their souls, and from making errors in judgement to passing judgement on us. He always shuffled while he walked, laughed in the face of the most aggressive yelling, and would go many extra miles to save five rupees.
This was also because, despite his undying loyalty, he never understood why we would dedicate our lives to something (theatre) that made us no money. And while he cared for everyone and was among the most trustworthy men that ever lived, he trusted no one.
Rama Ji, as we called him, was terrible with names, but good with faces, and whenever a familiar one passed, he offered tea and snacks to them. I’d like to think I instilled this sense of hospitality in him, but I suspect it was because he didn’t want strangers getting the benefit of leftovers.
Of course, my favourite story about him was when he met me at Prithvi Theatre one afternoon and assured me that everyone at the ongoing rehearsal had been given tea and food. Only, there was no rehearsal going on. He had, in his over-efficient way, catered to an outstation group whom none of us knew. On their part, they thought Prithvi was extremely hospitable. Sanjna Kapoor found out about this, loved what had transpired, and soon Rama ji was interviewed for the monthly newsletter, which made him a bona fide theatrewallah. He was initially rather pleased about the interview, before he began to think it was an attempt by the Prithvi staff to get his guard down so that they could gyp me.
Quite on his own
These eccentricities landed up endearing him to all the people he accused of being thieves even as he grudgingly fed them.
Perhaps this feeding frenzy had to do with the fact that before Rama came into our lives, he was a chef on an oil rig in the Gulf. And then worked with the hospitality division of Air India.
He always seemed to be a man of very modest means, but we learnt that he had vacationed for a month in Tokyo, and had a brother in Stuttgart. We also learnt that he had made a good amount of money in the Gulf, which he sent home regularly, only to return and find his wife had run away with the considerable savings, thus robbing him of the quality of life he had yearned for. Perhaps that’s why he found it so hard to trust people.
Grumpy mascot
The last month was not easy for him. An unusually active man for his age, he was confined to hospital wards and an ICU for alarming blood sugar levels. Some of us saw him deteriorate. All the wonderful tributes that popped up on social media remembered him as that cute and grumpy mascot of our theatre group.
Rama’s need to help was relentless. What was even more heartening is that he touched lives beyond our group. He had become an expert in theatre logistics, and was the man to go to if you needed any advice on those matters. If you didn’t need the advice, you’d still get it.
For all the work he did for the stage, we could never convince him to step on it. We begged him to do walk-ons and cameos, but he laughed and shuffled off. He was happy to act for the camera though, and enjoyed playing a farmer and a grandparent in some corporate videos we shot for State Bank of India. Or maybe he was just saving me the fee of one actor.
Fittingly, Rama appears in one of the last shots of my first film, where he is seen in character, bargaining with a tender coconut vendor. It was the first shot we took, and he was placed there, our mascot. As Ali so rightly ended, “It hurts to lose a part of the machinery, which is also to remind us that he left it self-sufficient and ready to gain momentum, as it has.” We lost an irreplaceable part of the theatre machinery in him. Our group lost perhaps its strongest pillar. I think we lost a grand old man of the theatre.
The writer is a theatre producer and director and hence often broke. To cope, he writes and directs films and web series and occasionally acts, albeit reluctantly.
