Lights Out

It is an evening in Mumbai in 1982. Imagine you are a woman trapped in a building by four men, terrified out of your wits. In the apartment complex next door, Leela, her husband Bhaskar and their friend Mohan gather for dinner. They are utter strangers to you and they hold your life in their hands.

They seem not to realise it. Or to take it lightly if they do. As you sit there, they are discussing you but with such apathy that it is almost more terrifying than the four men. You are a thought experiment to them– these civilized, urban people– a test of deductive reasoning, a spectacle to watch, and at their most perverse, enjoy. ‘Human’ doesn’t feature anywhere on the list.

As night falls, your torment begins and your neighbours take second helpings. You scream. Inhuman, terrible sounds that you didn’t know you were capable of making. The three have just finished deciding that you are undergoing an exorcism. You are dragged around by your foot and punched and kicked in the face and stomach. Bhaskar and Mohan joke about punctual demons while Leela implores them to stop.

You are raped, brutally and mercilessly gang raped as Leela’s school friend Naina drops by. She looks out of the window and she sees you. She is horrified at your condition. But you are still being raped some time later while she debates the virtues of decency with Bhaskar and Mohan.

The neighbours finally, finally decide to take action as Naina’s husband Surendar calls them to arms. It is far too little, far too late. Your rapists move on from you. The neighbours move on from the incident. You move on from the world.

This is the story, based on Manjula Padmanabhan’s script, that Dramanon chose to tell on the 18^th of October at the Syndicate Hall Auditorium. By their own admission, it was a challenging endeavour. The story is intense, layered and touches on sensitive issues that deserve to be treated with dignity. Against all odds, Dramanon proved once again why they are Manipal’s premiere drama group by succeeding.

The curtains opened onto an apartment scene that would be on stage for the rest of the play. The lifelike scene was a triumph for the sets department which demonstrated its keen eye for detail. Anjhana, played a very convincing maid without once saying anything. Everything from the constant hunch to her shoulders to the outfit she wore played its part in establishing her identity within seconds of the play starting.

The very beginning of the play, could perhaps have been shortened. Ameya Koushik (playing Bhaskar, the typical Indian middleclass man) and Sanjana Pai (Leela, the equally typical Indian housewife) managed to establish the background of the play and their characters’ reactions to it very early on but the audience had to sit through more repetition of Leela’s distress and Bhaskar’s apathy before the play moved forward.

Ameya was arguably the best actor on stage throughout, portraying every nuance of emotion with his expressions. Sanjana Pai was no less lucid in her depiction of Leela’s hysteria but the transition from there to a normal housewife planning dinner was jerky on occasion.

The play progressed with the arrival of Mohan Ram (Rishikesh Kulkarni) who was there to have dinner and watch the nightly spectacle. His arrival kicked off an intense discussion that finally clued the audience to in to exactly what had Leela so flustered. The callousness with which Bhaskar and Mohan discuss the distress of the person screaming every night had the audience simultaneously disgusted and laughing at the absurdity of it.

Until the screaming began.

Nothing but Treble was overshadowed for the rest of the play which was underscored by Ishani Sengupta’s bone-chilling screams and cries for help. It was a soundtrack that stood out in its utter disparity from the mundane scene on stage and it succeeded in drawing the audience into the intensity of the story even if it couldn’t do the same to the characters.

The arrival of Naina (Tanisha Chaterjee) and Surinder (Sharath Menon) brought some level of emotional relief to the audience who finally saw some desire to intervene from the characters on stage in place of frustrating passivity and, in Mohan’s case, voyeuristic pleasure.

Before intention succeeded in translating itself to action, the screaming ended, the rape ended and so did the play, leaving everyone with an unsettled mind and an image of a woman who could have been saved.