Crossroads

What would you do if you woke up one morning and found that you had no reflection? You look into a mirror, any mirror, every mirror and blankness stares back at you.

This was the start of Aaina’s first play of the semester, Reflections. It was supposed to be about self-reflection. About looking at yourself and your decisions. About finding out who you are as a person. Instead, it was a bizarre concoction of emotion, sex, humour and impassioned monologues.

Imagine a bedroom in a small apartment. For the sake of the record, it’s in Bangalore but really, it could be anywhere in India. Add a confused protagonist and a small supporting cast of eccentric, quirky and histrionic characters. Now imagine you’re watching all the events between these characters play out while you’re on LSD. Congratulations, you now know what watching the Aaina play felt like.

Before moving ahead, one thing must be said. The actors were nothing short of utterly brilliant. If anyone deserves credit for carrying the play, they do. None of the four stand out because all of them reached equal levels of excellence. They played their roles, however crazy, well enough to convince the audience and even get the audience to root for them. It was all the more impressive because the play itself did nothing to help them.

It started out rather slowly with the audience watching the protagonist known as ‘Dhakkan’ wake up and take an unusually long time to brush his teeth. His landlady enters, berates him affectionately for his lazy habits and then comes the discovery that he has lost his reflection.

What follows after is a very entertaining conversation between the two, which, although funny, didn’t really add much to the play in terms of character development and general storyline.

When one character stepped into the other’s mind through a window in an extremely stretched analogy, the play really began. The audience buckled down to watch only to soon wonder what on Earth they were watching.

The basic concept was simple. One character steps into another’s mind and we see the world through the mind of the second character. It worked well enough the first time but after that, it simply stopped making sense.

The rest of the play has, among other things, Jhandababu who lives up to his name but has no reason given for his presence, a girl from Dhakkan’s office whom he does not recognise but who claims to be madly in love with him, an elongated pun on roosters and, of course, forays by various characters into other characters’ minds. It was random, inexplicable and bizarre.

At the end of the play (spoiler alert) Dhakkan kills himself and his landlady screams as she looks into a mirror and realises her own reflection was gone.

The extremely creepy ending left us with more questions than answers. Why did Dhakkan lose his reflection? Why did the landlady lose her reflection? What does the play even mean?

Throughout the play, there is a nagging feeling that you’re missing something extremely profound. There is a feeling that there is a deeper meaning to all of this, some explanation that would make it all make sense. Unfortunately, there is no ‘aha’ moment within the play. A little closure would have probably added a lot more value to it.

The second play of the evening, Peele Scooter wala Aadmi, was a reprisal of Aaina’s performance at Centre Stage in Revels.