The Homecoming

Vinay Sharma in a still from Kameliya;

Dressed in a casual maroon T-shirt and a pair of jeans, the passion with which Vinay Sharma talks about his play clearly shows how strongly he feels about its storyline. Several times during the conversation, he steps into the shoes of his characters, enacting their mannerisms, speaking with their inflections. The reason behind this clarity of thought is the fact that the play is based on his life experiences. With A/126 Vrindavan Garden, Sharma makes his debut as a writer-director. It is one of the two plays that mark the launch of Now, a newly-formed Mumbai-based theatre group, which is the brainchild of Sharma along with friend Shashi Bhushan.
“I come from a simple middle-class family. The house in which we stayed in Ghaziabad, where I spent most of my childhood, was called A/126 Vrindavan Garden. It was always abuzz with people — relatives and visitors. When my father sold the house and decided on moving to our hometown Jaipur, I remember being very sad,” says Sharma, adding, “I had some beautiful memories associated with the house, which had got etched in my mind; the house’s name itself had certain khanak (rhythm). When a family member would make a telephone call and say ‘haan, ek sau chhabbis se bol rahe hain…’ (yes, speaking from 126), the tone had a unique charm. Through this play, I am just reliving those moments and alongside, aiming to introduce the audience to my simple upbringing.
A/126 Vrindavan Garden revolves around Ajay, who leads a monotonous life with his wife Saroj and 12-year-old son. The monotony breaks when a modern woman, Kanika, enters his life. What follows is the rift between the married couple first, and then between the lovers. On the face of it, says Sharma, the play does not have an intense, hard-hitting story. “But it has some beautiful moments weaved into a story. The audience takes a peek into a small household in Jaipur,” he adds.
Several sequences and characters in the play are inspired from Sharma’s life. For instance, there’s a character who says ‘besht (best) hai..’ to everything. “The character Vinod, a friend of Ajay, is based on one of my uncles. He would say ‘besht hai’ in every context — be it clothes, food, or anything else under the sun,” he explains.
Similarly, he says, there are few moments lifted straight from his own life. “At our house, whenever relatives visited us, they would bring bagfuls of fruits, which the entire family relished later. In one of the scenes, when Ajay visits Kanika, he gets a bag of mangoes. This is perhaps the most beautiful scene in the play. Ajay and Kanika sit eating mangoes for a couple of minutes onstage,” says Sharma. The lead cast includes Bhushan, Sonal Joshi, Sushant Sharma and Maanvi Gagroo.
After graduating from the acting batch of Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, Sharma moved to Mumbai in 2009. His first project was The Alchemist, a play in which he assisted Mahesh Dattani. Post this, he worked in films such as Lafange Parinde (2010) and 404 Error (2011), which kept him occupied for about two years.
“In between, to sustain financially, I wrote Hindi scripts for 25 English films. It’s a boring job but fueled my expenses,” he says with a laugh. As an assistant to Dattani for four years, he worked on projects such as Cherry Orchid and The Big Fat City. Apart from Ajita Suchitra Veera’s award-winning film Ballad of Rustom (2012), he also worked as an actor in Budhadeb Dasgupta’s film Trayodashi, which has 13 short films based on 13 poems by Rabindranath Tagore; the two short films in which Sharma acted were Kameliya and Fanki.