Manjima Chatterjee's “Limbo” splits open marriages, drags out the niggles and lets the characters attack their discomfort. Three couples, three marriages — each through silences and outbursts reconcile to a life together or apart.
Chatterjee's “Limbo” captures marriages in contemporary India travelling through new and old relationships, metropolis and suburbs. Her couples are shorn of names and severely entrenched in their gender identities. The oldest couple looks back at 40 years of marriage stuck in an udan khatola (a kind of cable car) over a holy place. The young, cosmopolitan couple squabbles over dishwashers, maids and remote control. Between the newly-wed suburban couple, dialogues are sparse with the “contemporary woman trapped in a traditional framework and the man caught up in his manhood.”
Chatterjee's aim with “Limbo” was to look at marriages — men and women, with the focus on manhood and womanhood. “I began with the old couple as I started noticing conversations and peculiarities of marriages — I mean the typical North Indian arranged marriages,” she says.
About her oldest couple, where the man and the woman played defined roles throughout their lives, she says: “There is a choice-less acceptance of their fate with a pinch of humour.” Her urban couple's lives and conversations are “controlled by the efficiency of things around them” — so, the dishwasher would do to bicker. “The verbosity of the older couple is complementary to the silences of the contemporary couple. I see them as ends of the arc,” says Chatterjee. The couple in between cultures, Chatterjee says: “is about an India in between”, where the discomfort between the man and the woman is stark and disturbing. If humour is not far away in the other stories, here it is not easy to laugh.
Chatterjee has also kept alive a sense of show and performance through the play, especially in the case of the young, urban couple. “There is a blurring of lines” between reality and the staged. “It is about how we view ourselves and the lens through which society sees us. I have kept a laugh track throughout as it is an aspect of the show,” she says. For someone who writes in English, Chatterjee wrote the oldest couple's tale in Hindi and then translated it — “It was more real in Hindi,” she says.
The idiom of expression is a challenge when writing in English, says Chatterjee. “I am a Bengali educated through English and married into a Hindi-speaking household. So, I find my thought pattern expressed in English has expressions from my Bengali heritage and U.P. background; that's a conflicted position,” she explains.
For the 31-year-old writer, the endeavour is to write in English, yet keep the local sensibilities intact. “The English we write in is not the English I have grown up reading. We should speak a language which the Indian audience can understand and emotionally relate with,” says Chatterjee. However, the playwright never contemplates for herself a role beyond the script. “I should not direct my own script. The director brings in another vision and interprets the script at a different level,” she says. A play, in its spirit and format, is not meant to be sacrosanct. “A play is not a novel. It is meant to be fleshed out on stage, where the director and the cast take it to another dimension,” she points out.
(The fourth in the series of five interviews with writers shortlisted for the MetroPlus Playwright Award 2010)
