Why do some memories from half-a-century ago seem brighter and clearer than what happened last year? From apparently nowhere pops up the name of a person long forgotten or the colour of the binding of an old book. Patterns of memory seem to have no logic at all.
When we were eight or nine, my twin, Ravi, and I, fired by stories about the Lone Ranger, Tarzan, Ramses II in the Ten Commandments, incidents from the Mahabharata and tips from watching school theatre, began to stage home plays. I don’t know how mother put up with the wrecking of our room every weekend. A bed was pushed against the wall, all the safety pins in the house held together an old sheet strung from one end of the bedpost to the other, the window darkened with towels and the afternoon topped off by a script which held no clue to how it was going to reach the middle, leave alone the end.
The real drama was that both of us wanted equal credits. Neither would yield on writing, directing or acting. Our audience (one patient, affectionate uncle) sat waiting endlessly for the “play” to unfold. Not once did the lead actor hesitate to abandon the stage to pound the playwright who shouted instructions and changes of script from the wings. We both wanted the best lines and fell upon the other if we didn’t get them. “Bring the prisoner in!,” was something we both wanted to shout thrice.
There was supposed to be an interval during which we gave our uncle imaginary popcorn and a cool drink, but what really happened was that to resolve our differences every five-eight minutes, one of us would yank the “curtain” till it closed (or collapsed in a heap) and step in front of it (like announcers in school) to say, “There will now be a five-minute break.” Even 20 years later, if he caught sight of one of us, our uncle would call across the room, “There will now be a five-minute break.”
Henry Kissinger once said that the history of what did not happen has never been written down. Well, fortunately for the world, the history of the actor I did not become was never recorded.
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