Knot So Funny

In another part, the ritual of offering wedding presents to guests, a mindless routine that lacks any real warmth, leads to socially disastrous consequences when a sari received as a gift is handed over to the servant. The giver of the present is entertained at home only to find the maid clad in the sari.

However, one may add, these are vignettes from most wedding albums and this kind of verisimilitude has been handled well by even lesser skilled playwrights. Just as one settles down with the familiar and the identifiable, come some disturbing revelations about the family. The maid has a daughter whom she had abandoned. There is a mystery about the bride-to-be Vidula8217;s birth certificate that bears her uncle8217;s name instead of her father8217;s. The mother8217;s nonchalance about the error leaves everyone scandalised.

When these threads appear in the play, they make the action rather seamed until we come to the scene that, in a flash of brilliance, makes the craftiness well worth it and we understand how Karnad works with moments of discomfort. The naive ingenue, Vidula, is now placed in the dark recess of an Internet cafeacute; where she has phone-sex via the Net. Karnad has none of the stuffy prudery one expects of an Oxford-educated gentleman. He is at his most expressive when he tumbles spontaneously into Vidula8217;s inner world. Her feisty defence in the face of exposure comes as a bolt from the blue, and once we catch our breath, we feel privileged in having had an insight into a way of life that goes beyond social decorum and upper-caste demureness. This play is a winner because we do not find her surreptitiousness in any way immoral. In the production directed by Lillete Dubey, which I saw, the audience is stunned into silence, but this is a silence that explodes into approval when Vidula finely and truthfully played by Ira Dubey takes the moral police head on and turns the tables to emerge shaken, but victorious. Sadly, Lillete8217;s production left out some of the explicit details of the phone-sex. It would have been nice to see if our self-styled 8220;liberal8221;, English theatre audiences will put their money where their mouth is. Lillete8217;s production otherwise does play out many nuances in Karnad8217;s writing and does not resort to either playing comic lines to the galleries or making the whole play lugubriously self important.

The ending is moving and the final goodbyes are said in true Chekhovian spirit. We are left with the maid Radhabai, very much like Firs the faithful old retainer in The Cherry Orchard, contemplating on her choices, but at the same time concerned about the routine of serving her mistress. Radhabai is a far more tragic figure than Firs.

Radhabai, one feels, ought to have taken centre stage earlier in the play. Her story is the most wrenching and one would have loved to see her respond to her story when she sees it on television, made operatic in the sleazy fashion that television is known for. Abandoning her daughter is the price she had to pay for serving the Nadkarni household. Keeping Radhabai in the periphery for so long shows Karnad8217;s preoccupation with the Brahmin8217;s point of view, but at the same time his compassion clearly rests on the other side. Although, Karnad is closer home, he doesn8217;t take us into the kitchen where his saddest story is set. Lillete8217;s production attempted that but, again, more would have been better in this case. Or perhaps it is best that Karnad chooses to remain on the verandah from where he fixes his gaze on the Dharwad home of the Nadkarnis, taking snapshots that may never make it to any wedding album. Like Chekhov, he too has written a fine comedy that will go down in history as a play of our time and place. This perhaps may not have been possible if he had simply wandered around the house like a child let loose.