Dastan-e-Ret Samadhi: Loss And Longing In Dastangoi

“At the age of 80, Amma has become swaarthi (self-centred),” states Amma’s daughter affectionately, while indulging her mother’s newfound whims and fancies. Not just swaarthi, Amma has become youthful too. “Jawaani samay par kyon nahi aati hai (Why does youth not make its presence felt at the right time?)?” the daughter asks as she watches her mother discard her sari and slip into a ‘gown’, also known colloquially as ‘nightie’, that item of liberating clothing which makes Amma an altogether new person. After moaning for days on end for her recently dead husband, refusing to leave her bed in her son’s house, and turning a stubborn back to all pleas of ‘Amma utho’ (Wake up Mother), Amma has turned over a new leaf in her daughter’s house.

In her husband’s restrictive household, Amma had secretly helped her daughter enjoy the simple pleasures of youth. Now, the daughter wants Amma to enjoy the same and has brought her to her house, to introduce her to a wider, new world. Breathing freely here, and with transgender Rosie advising her on everything, from beauty care to travel, Amma begins to bloom again. “This is the right time for jawaani,” muses her daughter, looking at her newfound desires. “When we are young we are too innocent to understand what jawaani is.”

The young-at-eighty Amma was the lead character of a Hindi-Urdu show, titled Dastan-e-Ret Samadhi, which was performed at the recent Prithvi Theatre Festival in Mumbai. Based on Geetanjali Shree’s novel, Ret Samadhi, whose English translation, Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker prize in 2022, the dastan (story) was directed and adapted for the stage by historian, writer, director and actor Mahmood Farooqui.

Farooqui, who has revived the Urdu, oral art of storytelling, Dastangoi, was also one of the actors who brought alive Amma’s delightful character before a sometimes-amused and sometimes-teary-eyed audience. Partnering him in narrating a complex story about a victim of the Partition was Poonam Girdhani. Together, the two of them depicted different lands, different times, and the nitty-gritty of daily life in bustling households, without the help of any props or costumes. Sitting on a pristine white diwan, in pristine white chikankari kurta pyjamas, with two large candles imparting a subtle glow around them, Farooqui and Girdhani engrossed viewers for two hours on the sheer strength of their voice modulation and amazing body language.

Several reviewers of Tomb of Sand found the book extremely profound but difficult as well. How much more difficult must it have been for Farooqui to compress an almost 700-page novel into a two-hour show while retaining the essence of the original! The dastan writer reveals a bit of the process at the beginning of the show, “In a book you can afford to go back and forth in time, following the stream of consciousness, but for a narration on stage, a linear style is preferable. I had to curtail many of the literary flourishes of the book.”

After the show, in a chat backstage with this writer, he revealed more of the process, “To begin with, I wrote a three-hour show. Apart from the alankar (embellishments) in the book, I, too, had added a lot of alankar. But then my producer, Anusha Rizvi, advised me to stop showing off and cut to the chase. So I edited the story to two hours.” Nevertheless, the edited version retains some alankar in the form of quotations from other writers that add dimensions to subjects such as memory, displacement, borders, separation, love and longing. To Farooqui’s credit, the quotations and narrative merge together seamlessly.

One is, therefore, surprised to hear that Farooqui was, initially, hesitant to take up Shree’s proposal to stage her book as a dastan. “Though I had, in the past, done dastans of books like Tagore’s Ghare Baire and Sri Lal Sukla’s Raag Darbari, doing Ret Samadhi was daunting! Shree convinced me it could be done.”

The two were on the same page throughout and, so, unlike many adaptations of books for the silver screen or stage that fail to live up to expectations, Dastan-e-Ret Samadhi succeeds in holding your attention and immersing you completely in Amma’s story. Her trajectory as she transforms from a grief-stricken, lonely woman to a childlike, demanding person, bent on starting life again by travelling back to her roots in the country that became Pakistan, is both entertaining and deeply moving.

Apart from Shree’s and Farooqui’s perfect rapport, what makes Amma’s story so convincing is the way it is narrated by Farooqui and Girdhani. The latter identified with Amma completely as her family, too, had been uprooted by the Partition. “I have seen my father restless and insecure all his life despite having a stable government job. His work required him to move house often and he was given accommodation by the government. Yet, he bought his own house each time he got transferred. The trauma of being forced out of his land scarred him permanently. He never wanted to live in a house from where he could be evicted. I have heard so many stories from him and my grandfather about the Partition that I think their pain is part of my genes now. I tend to gravitate towards migration stories, both when performing dastans and when writing,” says Girdhani.

Girdhani and Farooqui portray not just the lovable Amma convincingly, but bring alive a whole host of other characters. Amma’s son, referred to as Bade, has inherited all the patriarchal traits of his domineering father, who thought shouting at others was his birthright, while her daughter was expected to be docile and obedient with no particular life of her own. Later, Bade’s wife has to continue the tradition of being a meek bahu (daughter-in-law). But both, beti (daughter) and bahu, unshackle themselves from patriarchal control to some extent. The daughter leaves home to live independently and the bahu snatches some me-time while continuing to live with her boorish husband. There is a telling scene of both of them standing on the threshold of the latter’s house. The beti is about to step in and the Reeboks-wearing bahu is about to step out. Both are hesitant. While the beti is afraid she may not be able to leave the house again, the bahu is worried she may not be allowed to enter it again. “Both are defying patriarchy but their dilemmas are different,” points out Girdhani. “I could understand and identify with both their struggles.”

Transgender Rosie bua has no such baggage. Also a victim of the Partition, Rosie was rescued by a Christian missionary who educated her and taught her professional skills so she could earn a living and be independent. She pops in at the beti’s house not just for Diwali baqsheesh, but regularly, to chat with Amma and give her advice on how to live a beautiful life. From herbal shampoos and face packs to crossing the sarhad (border) to retrieve memories, Rosie encourages Amma all the way.

Farooqui and Girdhani also bring alive different households, reflecting different lifestyles. Stuffy bureaucrat Bade’s home sees garden parties where the who’s who rub shoulders with one another. It is an efficiently-run house sans warmth, and quite a world apart from the lively household in Lahore, where Amma spent her childhood and part of her youth. When she returns, in her autumn years, to the latter house with her daughter, she can remember every detail of her first home. It was a five-storey building inhabited by a large joint family. One of her uncles was an eye doctor, well-known in the neighbourhood. “Neighbours dropped in and out of one another’s homes. There were no boundaries,” recalls Amma, eyes aglow with memories of carefree times when she indulged in innocent pastimes like playing carrom or cycling with her friend Kauser whose brother she loved.

The building is not the same anymore. The top floors are crumbling, there is a shop selling cricket gear on the ground floor; and the people living in it are strangers. But one of the inhabitants, an old man, recognises Chanda (that is what Amma was called in her childhood) as the niece of the eye doctor. “So, the house is both familiar and strange for her,” relates Farooqui. “It is strange how familiar it is.”

Amma’s life is a deeply moving saga that many young women may have gone through on both sides of the divide. Loving one person dearly and marrying another, to play, on the surface, a dutiful wife, mother, mother-in-law; but some of them, like Amma, never forgetting their youth, clutching on to sweet memories. Dastan-e-Ret Samadhi has a prologue by Farooqui on the role of memory in our lives. Is it a burden or a blessing? “Memories can be painful, but they also make life more meaningful,” he points out.

Farooqui and Girdhani too made that night at Prithvi Theatre meaningful… and magical.

(Views expressed are personal)

Alpana Chowdhury is a writer and independent journalist