Memory Is A Blue Mug

Have you noticed, how for every point, life offers a counterpoint? As if to remind you that for every ‘this,’ there is a ‘that?’  And for every Delhi Belly, there is The Blue Mug? How absolutely wonderful that on a day when my  memory had been reduced to a cuss word and the rumble of someone’s upset stomach, life also orchestrated  the opportunity to watch, The Company Theatre’s The Blue Mug. And then at Bangalore’s Ranga Shankara, moments before the play was to start, I ran into a Hemant Kumar song. ‘Kahan Ab Mohabbat Ke Maare Rahenge,’ he went and suddenly, forgive the sentimentality, I felt a catch in my throat. As if he was singing of not just me but an entire generation that feels homeless today. Only because the world it grew up in has turned into an unfamiliar place. 

 Within seconds as one song looped into another, my mind shrugged off the memory of a film that had humoured me occasionally, shocked me constantly but made me feel nothing. This turmult of nostalgia prepped the spirit for what was to follow. A stream of consciousness, headlong, free-fall into lush memories. 

A time when families celebrated seasons by binging on mangoes and bhuttas. When you wrote inland letters to parents from school excursions. When the only ‘dada type’ thing young college students did was to watch Jyoti Bane Jwala and catch screen heroes doing ‘dada type’ things on screen. When Vicco Vajradanti ads in cinema halls were looked forward to. When  sun-baked terraces witnessed budding romances and at night were splashed with buckets of water for families to sleep the summer heat off to the rhythm of a distant train. When young boys discovered old copies of Debonair in a cupboard and were thrilled. When delirious uncles spoke of Indira Gandhi as Ma Durga and imagined they were being followed by shadowy men during the Emergency. When it was cool to remember by heart, the poetry of Nirala, Maithili Sharan Gupt, Harivansh Rai Bachchan.

 When family holidays meant travelling in a train to visit grandparents and discovering ‘characters’ like Baccha, the errand boy of the Saharanpur mohalla and the “tich” (read tip-top) aunt with a gift for impersonation. Days when a circus came to town and you rushed to watch it. Days when love just meant gazing at each other. When the sunshine of childhood in the 70s and the 80s slowly grew muddy as it witnessed the coming of age of a nation. And  watched mutely, the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi.

One of the leading actors of the play, Sheeba Chadha relived the horror of days when the phone would not stop ringing in Sikh households and families would gather bricks on their terraces in a vain attempt to shoo off rioting groups. And children watched smoke rising in a distance from the houses that could not fight back. Yes, it really happened. As did the events of December 6, 1992. 

 As did the moments when people we loved died, or grew old or forgetful and we came of age, holding on to a part of our lives almost as if it was a favourite blue mug. Chipped. With a handle missing but still a favourite. Director Atul Kumar who grew up in the chaotic innards of Old Delhi was the invisible thread that joined together, the personal recollections of his gifted actors-Rajat Kapoor, Vinay Pathak, Sheeba Chadha and Munish Bhardwaj. And each of them brought a different energy to their performances.

 Kapoor was the languid, understated, almost pensive adult looking back at his childhood with some humour, irony and unforgettable one liners like, “We moved into a new house in 1970 but still refer to as the new house!”

Pathak was like a scene stealing master of ceremonies. Flamboyant, vibrant, shifting from the high octane energy of a cruel circus clown to the awkward body language of a teenaged boy to the boy pretending to be a man in college, to a child feeling abandoned by a father who just came to his hostel to ask three questions and left without looking back.

 Sheeba Chadha was many bodies, many voices, many memories and blindingly brilliant as she played a shy young child  surrounded by relatives in an ancestral home she did not much like visiting, a firebrand Chhai Ji, a serene woman on a beach looking for blue and green glass pieces, a horrified young girl watching her innocence go up in smoke in 1984.

 And Munish Bhardwaj effortlessly evoking chuckles as he recalled that rush of blood to the head on a first date and his almost disbelieving acceptance of a coffee invitation from the woman of his dreams. His joy when he stepped into a cinema hall for the first time to watch Haathi Mere Saathi. And his deep grief over losing his brother.

 The master stroke of the play is ofcourse the cameo played by Ranvir Shorey. He is a snatch taken from The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, a book of essays by neurologist Oliver Sacks. And ably supported by Shipra Singh, he becomes a shred of all our memories. Of an entire generation still stuck in simpler times when watching Dilip Kumar cradle Amitabh Bachchan’s head in the climax of  Shakti was cathartic. Shorey plays, with  great pathos, the younger son of a Sikh family who has vivid memories of his childhood, his youth but cannot remember the journey to middle age. Much like the country we all inhabit. He can’t even recall his age anymore. He can only remember, the memories that have defined him.

 The feeling of inadequacy after failing in college. The occasionally bawdy jokes his friends used to tell in college. The lack of affection from his father. The preferential treatment enjoyed by his academically brilliant brother. The slaps he received from his family over a beer of bottle.

The song that plays everytime he appears is, ‘Zindagi Pyar Ki Do Chaar Ghadi Hoti Hai’ as if to convey that it is not the length of life but the feeling with which it is lived that matters.

 There is unspent pain and some amount of innocence still intact in the shell of this man and Ranvir is compellingly moving with that lost gaze and his tragic inability to answer even a question as fundamental as, “Do you feel alive?”  

And that really is the key question that the play throws up. Do we feel alive and if yes, than what are the memories that connect us most deeply with the centre of life? Do we live alive, making memories everyday or are we just vessels of the past? Or just narrators of unfinished stories, holding on to our respective, chipped blue mugs?    

The Blue Mug will play next at  

Delhi, Kamani Auditorium (Copernicus Marg)

25^th July, Monday, 7:30 pm

26^th July, Tuesday, 7:30 pm

Bookings: www.bookmyshow.com (011-39895050)

Tickets also available at Teksons Book Shop (South Ex & GK II) & at gate

Reema Moudgil is the author of  Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )