“Jaane wo kaise log the jinke pyar ko pyar mila”
A love story is seldom just a story between lovers. It is an expedition of tears and laughter, betrayal and comfort and a rollercoaster ride that has everyone reeling by the end. Sat down in the meticulously arranged (kudos to the crowd management team) seats at our very own OAT, nothing could have prepared me for the journey of the next two hours.
This article isn’t a review of the play. It isn’t a synopsis or a criticism of the acting and production. It is simply a honest retelling of the emotions 150 minutes managed to evoke in me. I cried with Mitra, I laughed with Bapu, I sympathised with Nama, I screamed with Dalvi and I drank with Pandey. At the end of the play, I left with a question in my mind. What is love, if not obsession of the highest degree?
When Bapu, played by Aditi Srivastava, begins the story we can’t help but be drawn to him. An awkward nobody, lost in the grand scheme of college life. Sound familiar? We’ve all met a Bapu, what's more, we’ve all been a Bapu at some point or the other. The mannerisms were infectious in their ability to draw laughter from the crowd, and as an audience, we succumbed.
The enigmatic Mitra, played by Ritu Kamat, was truly the star of the show. A troubled lesbian on a path of self discovery but the path is riddled with thorns of judgement and homophobia. Her monologues were raw in both their writing and their portrayal, and she had us at the edge of our seats with every interaction.
Nama, portrayed by Ren, comes to us as nothing more than the gentle love interest caught in between Mitra and Dalvi, played by Dheer Panjwani. And she leaves as a woman who is truly ensnared by her inability to fight back, who is scared and perhaps shadowed by her counterparts.
The show would be incomplete without Pandey, played by Sonika Chellani, the missing piece in both the story and the play’s connection with its viewers. The characters intertwine and mesh with each other, and Pandey is the alcoholic knot that holds them together.
All this to say, each character, including the extras, were so painfully three dimensional, that I found myself looking away. Not because I was afraid of facing them, but because I was afraid of what they were facing.
The play is a painful tale of love and obsession, love and anger, love and jealousy, love and betrayal, love and hope, love and distance, love and manipulation, love and it’s various forms.
Each and every scene was meticulously crafted and cradled in the hands of the directors, Keertana and Vidhi. As a member of the audience, I can only hope I did it justice.
As a university, I can only say that Mitrachi Goshta is perhaps not the play we wanted, but it is the play we needed. At the cusp of adulthood, it is hard to navigate the feelings that are suddenly big and painful and terrifiying. Seeing Mitra, Bapu, Nama, Pandey and Dalvi navigate them, albeit wrongly most of the time, was a journey that stung, but that I would take again.
finding love was the easy part/it was keeping it that was difficult/ it was keeping love in my arms without suffocating it with fingers that only know how to wrap around throats and not to caress cheeks/ it was keeping love away from the parts of me that are ugly and wrong, that collect in the pit of my stomach like black sludge/ it was keeping love even though we're older now and the moniker of ‘finders keepers, losers weepers’ no longer holds true because there's no one I'd rather weep for than love/ finding love was the easy part
P.C - Aishani
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