Woody Allen, a great filmmaker, once compared the love of someone or something to a joke. The joke goes – “this… this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken.” And, uh, the doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” The guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.” The love for someone or of something is always irrational and crazy and absurd, but in the end we all need the eggs. It is this innocent, juvenile love that one becomes privy to in the play Mamtaz Bhai Patangwale, the love of a young boy for his hero the Kitemaker. As all stories of love and loss go, this play is an exploration of the coming of age of a boy, a Bildunsgroman that takes us back to our own days of young, replete with possibility and passion and eventually a descent down the murky path into loss of innocence and bad choices.

 

The play begins with characters Vivek and his wife sharing a cozy moment when all of a sudden ‘Vicky’ (Vivek’s pet name) gets a call from his childhood friend Anand asking him to visit the village. The Kitemaker, Mamtaz bhai isn’t doing well. With that, the play rewinds back to Vicky’s childhood in the village. The dialogues are replete with colloquialisms, and the play continues with a few laughs. Most of the initial sequences explore the merriment and playfulness in the life of a school-going Vicky. Vicky is a lover of kites and holds Mamtaz Bhai the kitemaker in the highest of regards, the pedestal of a god. A stubborn Vicky clings to his passion (despite admonitions from his teacher and mother), until one day he sees Mamtaz Bhai with his family. This marks the fall of Mamtaz Bhai in Vicky’s eyes from the status of a God to a mere human being, and he lets go off the strings that tie him to his dreams. A scorned Vicky gives up on kite-flying altogether and eventually, burdened by his circumstances ends up committing an act treason.

 

Cinema and drama are two very different mediums of expression. With film, one can edit as one pleases, and in doing so, play with time-lines, plots, delivery and so on. Now, imagine a play employing the same techniques. Imagine stageplay being able to rewind, forward, play in slow motion, and freeze time itself. This is one of the reasons why Mamtaz Bhai Patangwale was such a powerful play. It was beautifully executed and was able to infuse the versatility of cinema with the immediacy of drama. Certain scenes were delivered in slow motion (in order to heighten the effect of the tension) and at other times, the silence of the protagonist’s thought would be punctuated with an older or younger Vicky, as either a voice of conscience or a voice of regret and reminiscing.

 

There are certain dialogues we always remember a play, a movie or a book for, lines that usually capture the essence of the form. There is an instance in the play where a young Anand (Vicky’s childhood friend) explains to Vicky, ‘Your kite’s flown away, but the string still lies in Mumtaz bhai’s hands’. The play nears its end and the audience has been reduced in some elementary way. The tension is built, nobody, not even the protagonist, can take anymore of the heart ache, more of this and there is a risk of a dam breaking loose. And as it was built, it subsides, not into oblivion, but into a sense of unease. The audience is unsettled and there is a lot of shifting around in seats, testimony to the fact that they’ve been touched in some way. The plays bring back memories of a long lost lover, as if from a distant dream, one that you had to let go of but cannot stop thinking about.

 

-Vipin Krishna (META Secretariat)