Mera Who Matlab Nahi Thha, directed by Rakesh Bedi, brought veteran actor Neena Gupta back on stage after nine years. The play analyses the delicacy of love, its assumptions and reality and changing relationships that have an intimacy beyond physicality. Rinku Ghosh watched Gupta and producer Anupam Kher bring the characters to life
Perhaps it is good that actor-director Rakesh Bedi’s play, Mera Who Matlab Nahi Thha, came home in the autumnal glow of November. Helmed by Anupam Kher as producer and its male protagonist and bonded by a powerhouse performance from Neena Gupta (she is returning to stage after nine years) it had nostalgia and longing written all over it. Set in Delhi, brought to life by artistes who began their journey in this city and on stage at Kamani Auditorium, it was meant to be. So despite the reviews in Mumbai and the US, where the play was staged before, it truly became slice of life and lent itself to the immediacy of emotion and passion here.
The story revolves around the meeting in lodi Garden of former lovers Preetam Singh Chopra (Kher) and Hema Roy (Gupta) to reassess each other and give a closure to their unrequited love of 35 years. Hema, we come to know, is to move to the UK permanently and seeks a meeting, not for a reunion but to give a “clean chit” to a man who circumstance proved had let her down but for whom her faith was unwavering, believing he must have had a reason for doing so. The play works only because of these self-probes into the recesses of the mind of two people who are refreshing with their open admission of frailties and their abiding soul-seated understanding of each other.
The leads then embark on an emotional recounting of their lives on the shared space of a park bench and then slip into the easy familiarity of a well-worn couple who can scan, scratch and comfort each other, down to their deepest, ugliest crevices, and rescue each other back. Something that eluded them in their compromised marital lives. In their intervening years, Preetam was trapped by a manipulative spouse while Hema writhed in an abusive marriage. Parental opposition and a clever concealing of letters and phone lines by two culturally different families make you thank that you are better off in digital times.
But it also points to a generation which was beholden to the tradition of being responsible to the roadmap of elders, yet who communicated with each other with all their angst, ardour, sincerity and desperation. Theirs is an ode to the tested epistolary tradition of romance, a literary tool which unfortunately limited Preetam and Hema’s practical pursuits, except fuelling their longing for each other. The title has much to do with Preetam’s caginess and inhibitions, of keeping things to himself and, therefore, leaving himself open to misinterpretation. The twist comes in the end when the straightforward and fiery Hema, the other polarity, becomes unsure and cagey about her own future and mouths the same line.....much to Preetam’s alacrity.
Needless to say Kher and Gupta, both of whom have a cinematic body of excellence, give this play their all as stage performers. Their intensity and tautness never flags as they traverse the graph of emotions, from the calmness of afterthought to the explosion of rage, from the sepia-toned lookback to the immediacy of the present, from the immensity of their past lives to the everydayness of current moments. Both Kher and Gupta swim through these tides with seamless ease and perfect timing. And of course special mention must be made of Gupta, who even role-plays the character of Nigar, Preetam’s unaccomplished wife, in a flashback sequence and immediately swings back to the present in see-saw scenes of the second act. It made the contrast between the two women stark and perhaps led you to sympathise with the not-so-gutsy Preetam.
This brilliant role reversal is one of the highlights and makes us wonder why the flashback of Gupta’s character Hema was done in a film projected on to the backdrop. She would have made for an equally deft narrator. Multimedia is a good tool to have in a setpiece but when you have two strong performers, these frills seem more intrusive and welded for convenience. Perhaps, it was meant to trim down the cast but the visuals distracted more than reeling the audience in. Also, the higher balconies had to make do with a torso view of the filmed flashback.
Kher and Gupta will obviously be talked about as much as people did of Farooq Sheikh and Shabana Azmi in Tumhari Amrita. Kher himself said at the end of the play that he hoped this could run another 25 years. But the true star of this original Hindi play (they come rare) has to go to writer-director Rakesh Bedi who engages the audience with the right balance of poignancy and humour, his own comical interludes between dramatic moments and his masterful and easy-to-ear dialogues.
For this play is about the power of words which indeed takes our hearts away. It is the clever interplay of dialogues that not only makes the characters endearing but makes the play “safely saleable and fundable” despite the seriousness and depth of content. A few jewels stand out like, “Memories are sweet but they are painful when you recall them” or the one about “following your destination or destination itself will be lost wondering who its characters are meant to be.”
In the end, kudos to the director for analysing the delicacy of first love, its assumption and reality, changing relationships that have an intimacy beyond physicality and not giving up the chase. Ever.