The Poet and the Playwright.

It is the little things that make a difference in poetry. No one knew this better than poet Arun Kolatkar. He had the uncommon gift of using the exact word and the precise phrase.  

It is also the little things that make a difference in theatre. When the curtains parted on a wet Saturday evening, the audience was privy to a finely nuanced rendition of Kolatkar’s poems including some from ‘Jejuri’ (1976) like Yashwant Rao, The Bus, and Heart of Ruin by the quartet of R Sunder, V Balakrishnan, Andrea Jeremiah and Namrata Kartik. 

Dark Horse is a dramatization of a journalist’s meeting with Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004) at the poet’s local haunt, the Wayside Inn in 1992. Director-scriptwriter Gowri Ramnarayan has re-constructed the meeting, with colourful sentences like ‘South Indians prefer coffee, no?’ drawing a barely suppressed smile from the audience.  

“You can never truly understand a poem. It is nice when a poem reveals different meanings every time you read it”, says Gowri Ramnarayan. This quality of Kolatkar’s poetry may also be the reason it could lend itself to dramatisation. “There was never a fixed format to the play. Thus, the characters could bring their own personality to each of the poems that were performed,” says Ms. Ramnarayan. The success of the play lies in its effortless weaving together of poetry, prose and music, with Amritha Murali doing a brilliant job as the vocalist.  

Sarpa Satra is a comment on the war of retribution that mankind is constantly engaged in. However, this part of the play seemed the weakest leaving the audience groping in the dark. The transition from the Kalaghoda poems to Sarpa Satra is awkward, almost abrupt.  Sarpa Satra is pregnant with meaning especially in modern times and deserved a more  well-rounded treatment.

Dhritiman Chaterji playing the poet, Arun Kolatkar himself, is superb in his delivery and startling in the reclusive air that he exudes. Chaterji’s success lies in his depiction not only of Kolatkar’s solitude even as he is meeting a journalist but also Kolatkar’s wider world view. There is a scene nearly at the end of the play where Kolatkar himself shows the journalist the pie dog, the leper, the beggar and the other riff- raff of society. 

The play brings to the fore Kolatkar’s silent rebellion, be it against theUniversity of
Mumbai’s textbooks or in his treatment of the common subjects. One of the most enduring scenes in the play was when the journalist asks him a question about his having fallen in love to which Kolatkar replies, “There could be an answer to that question but Arun Kolatkar doesn’t know it.” Arun Kolatkar never claimed to have any answers. The Dark Horse attempted to provide some.  

Stories

  

Bomb blasts don’t warn you. They just happen and when they do, they leave dead people, in their wake. The first time I saw a dead body, I could not fathom the possibility that the fine, noble human form could lie sprawled disgracefully in a partially destroyed train. The body had no name. It is a mere statistic in newsprint that will get lost in the mass of attributions and approximations.

I was in the market, close to the Vile Parle railway station in Mumbai, buying clothes for myself. The everyday sounds of the market were punctuated by a loud noise. Almost at the same time, shops downed their shutters, people rushed out and there was pandemonium. I rushed to the platform, drawn by the vicarious pleasure of drama. The police were already trying to shoo avid observers like me, away from the scene. That is when the corpse fell out and it lay at my feet with an expression of scorn. The corpse seemed to mock my tenuous existence. Snap, snap. The tenuous link was severed.

I stood there for a full two minutes before one of the attendants hauled the body away, now wrapped in coarse linen, usually reserved for victims of suicides and accidents on train stations. I slowly made my way back to the staircase, now full of paramedics, fire fighters and idlers. The station was strewn with charred plastic and the smell of burnt flesh lingered in the air.

The train bogey was almost on the platform. The person who climbed the over bridge was numb with fear and agony. It was the first time I had seen a dead body, in its ugly glory. Somehow, the world ceases to be the same after one look at a dead body and one is left thinking that there will never be any innocence in the world.

At such times, the only recourse that you have is to pretend that you didn’t see. The beginning of insensitivity is always scathing and you react rather indignantly. With the passage of time, you accept because you begin to learn the difference between a story and reality.

A story can never be an extension of you.