What memories can we have of a play about memories? That it was intensely personal theatre. That it had the strength to laugh at itself, and yet had gravitas, so that a single person onstage seemed to fill it completely. “This play is about…,” one of the characters in Atul Kumar's ‘The Blue Mug' began, then broke off looking perplexed. “Seventy five minutes long” interjected Rajat Kapoor. And, that was all they would say.
Psychiatrist Konkona Sen is referred a patient, Ranvir Shorey, with a cryptic transfer note that only said “Demented, disoriented, confused and helpless”. He is Joginder Chauhan, speech slurred through a mouth full of Punjabi twang, whose world had stopped sometime in 1983.
Ranvir, with an injured, perplexed air, toying incessantly with his white kurta; with exquisitely intricate memories of his younger days, the total sensory recall of sights and scents and sounds, and a gaping wound in recollection thereafter.
“It is only when you begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, that you realise it's what life is made of,” said Konkana Sen, quoting the words of celebrated Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel.
And, as for the others, each assumed a faintly familiar character, like somebody you might have once known. Rajat Kapoor is a man who has let life beat him, possibly without much of a fight. Sheeba Chadha has more secrets than she will say, and her stories are laced bitterly with anger. Vinay Pathak is a man who uses his exuberance to mask a troubling emptiness within. Munish Bhardwaj has never learnt to make the first move, and finds even the well-beaten path rough going. They came and went, remembering stories from their respective pasts.
The play was based loosely on neurologist Oliver Sack's book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat , a compilation of case studies of people stranded in the mysterious world of neurological disorders — including a woman who feels disembodied, a man who remembers nothing since WWII, and indeed, a man who mistook his wife for a hat.
Somehow, the recollections tended to sometimes veer off familiarity, and nosedive into clichés — the staple diet of summer vacations, ancestral homes, neglectful fathers, and reading pornographic magazines on the sly, all becoming tiresomely repetitive.
But some survived — Vinay had a joker spit at him “through his eyes!” and has had nightmares about it for the rest of his life; Sheeba spoke of a sea shore strewn with blue and green glass pebbles; Rajat, quietly, said: “My dad woke up in the middle of the night, and said, there is a man on the ceiling.”
The sparse music lent itself wonderfully to the stories; but not the lights. They could have performed unabashedly on the open, bare stage, but were painfully shy, and more than a little nervous. And, mikes played truant, so that lines were dropped and never found again.
Then all six came together, haphazardly tossing snatches of their lives into the air. Rajat, wearing his mother's saris, “and then standing on the balcony so our neighbours could see us”, he said, slapping his forehead in resignation. Eleven-year-old Sheeba who wanted to drink milk from a glass bottle with a rubber nipple — and did. Vinay remembered his first public humiliation with pride. Then, there were earthworms, old shoes, mad uncles, gol gappas , telephone numbers and white bras.
Words mean nothing
Then, they remembered the play. Their own play. Their memories coming closer together, fading, and then forgetting. In a bizarre remembrance of itself, the words meant nothing at all. “We seem to make memories the way we want to make ourselves seem,” they said.
At the end of it all, a few images persist. A blue-green shore, a man on the ceiling and a slightly chipped old blue mug — all on a single bare stage. Perhaps, that is why we will remember this play.
