dramatics, monsoon, and midnight's children

the pitter-patter politics of pubescent theatrics at cathedral

June in Bombay. Casual greatness abounds. History decloaks her usual loftiness, and condenses into the cu-mu-no-lim-bous clouds that hang low in the bluest blue of centuries-old legacies, precipitating on plaited children. Present day Pedder Road: I sit in the balcony of my home, bathed in the ennui of a summer spent burning through boys and bearing my mother’s disappointment, slowly working my way through Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Mr Rushdie writes like an old friend would: “Mr Methwold is refilling the glasses as the sun dives towards the Arabian Sea behind the Breach Candy pool, [and he says] ‘beneath this stiff English exterior lurks a mind with a very Indian lust for allegory.’” And suddenly, literature and living fold into a linear timeline, the geography of my imagination maps perfectly onto the memories of my Anglicising ancestors, allegory and ambition explode in the breakaway glass of my eyes. Because, look!, Rushdie urges. And then outside I look– the same shimmering Arabian sea, riven by the same colonial sun, diving behind the same Breach Candy Club pool (which, tragically, is now ravaged by the Coastal Road per New India’s unseemly desire for Development). And beyond the melting horizon of the spilling, languorous sunset, I see the same English exterior wrap its tongue around my taste and temperament, the Indian lust for allegory filling the pools of my lungs with seawater and storytelling.

As I sit there for hours, watching the sky’s cells coagulate into grey creams and slit-sun showers of blessings (having, as my mother witheringly puts it, nothing better to do), the air begins to ache with History - marshy and mischievous, mixed with the chutnied butter of JB sandwiches and manic rehearsals. Because June, at the Cathedral and John Connon School, is ruled by Inter-House Dramatics. Less importantly, swimming, second-term exams, and throwball also take up afterschool hours, but it is through Dramatics that I, with my postmodern-unpatriotic-secular-individualism, learnt the art of uncomplicated being. Like Mr Rushdie’s protagonist, a prick-ish Cathedral boy whose fate pulses and pounds with that of the nascent nation’s, Dramatics, or the House play, directed the blithering egotism of adolescents towards the greater good of the collective. Pardon my histrionics. Find the truths in their theatre.

My first Dramatics was in 2014: wooden archways walked me into a tiled classroom where budding thespians and truants pickled on desks carved with profanities and promises, chairs with gaits of their own, and floors stamped with polished shoes shiny enough to avoid the indignity of costing a House a Minus Point in the annual cup (the winner of whom was charmingly called the ‘cock house,’ but I had not yet developed feminist sensibilities enough to fault this). On the day of auditions for the house play, it was, as it always was in those days, an ecstatic, roaring Wednesday afternoon - clouds belched into the searing sky, warm dreams tumbled out of teenage teeth, and damp shale courts scraped teaming knees. The playful threat of monsoon felted the air with hair-frizzing humidity, but I had not yet developed feminine sensibilities enough to fault this. This would be the day when I, eternal star of my own show, was superbly cast as a reporter with one line in the opening scene. The excitement was all too much to bear.

An undyingly loyal companion in all inter-house pursuits (cultural or romantic), sat beside me atop a desk palimpsest, as a looming, invincible Prefect sermonized on many things, although nothing in particular, just your everyday wisdom-of-the-elders, and our acquiescent heads nodded like soldiers. Of the 4 houses, mine was Wilson, the only group identity I’ve ever believed in. As I listened to the script our seniors hurriedly explained – we were always running out of time for everything and nothing – I could see why we’d earned a reputation as a house determined to try to make a Great Play, never mind if it was a good play. This 20-minute script featured, impossibly, a dirty politician responsible for the massacre of innocents, an unsuitable marriage, a boy orphaned by the massacre seeking revenge through seduction, an undercover maid, and a high-stakes pre-election shootout. And it was a musical. Clearly, Wilson house had caught the History bug, and my head leaked trickled-down ditties. 

During those superhuman school days, 6:30 am to 2:30 pm flashed by with little ceremony, and at precisely 2:45 pm, the work began. Blazered bodies whose only initiation to the arts was their big age and boundless confidence, would deliver impassioned speeches about work ethics, make demands of integrity, and harbour expectations of excellence. Discipline, dreams, and duty were all the same to us, and it is with unquestioning allegiance (to what, I never deeply introspected about) that we fiercely performed what was asked of us. Of course, we were like, 14 years old. So, the meaning of hard work and excellence was welded by old Latin phrases we did not understand, handed to us by teachers who did not understand us. But easily, within the predictable, heritage-sited structure of Cathedral, my friends and I, never an easy bunch to control, learnt the motions of discipline. Of dreams. Of Duty. With some shame and much chagrin, I recall now the changed lyrics to the school song: house first, school next, self last. The level of dedication - what we called ‘house spirit’ - that I felt then, seems plainly ridiculous and embarrassing today, in the icy age of nonchalance and effortlessness. If I see people ‘hustling,’ I immediately want to bury myself in a deep hole. Were we sheep back then? Chatterboxes who just didn’t know how to be cool? Perhaps. But how fertile time felt. How grave and giggly were our worlds.

It was in those early June Dramatics days that the disease of optimism first plagued my mind with hopes about Meaning and Deserving and Greatness. Mr Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem (house unknown) came of age in the verve of Bombay talkies and melodrama served at every Muchhad paanwala. In Midnight’s Children, the babies born at the hour of Nehruvian independence bore the lush burden of birthing, with them, independent India. Mr Rushdie wrote magic to reveal a reality where yes, the personal is political. But even juicier, the present-personal-political is yoked to the past-universal-historical. And the frailly-fated-future tears through Saleem’s quest for Purpose. When Mr Rushdie invokes Cathedral’s school song, he claims it is the city’s song as much as it is our sheltered private school’s:

“This vision – a dream of a British Bombay – was a notion of such force that it set time in motion. History churned ahead, with their Fort and land-reclamation, and before you could blink there was a city here, Bombay, of which the old tune sang:

Prima in Indus,

Gateway of India,

Door to the East,

With its face to the West.”

Saleem repeats through the novel, “to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” Eight years later, watching the monsoon gurgle in the gloaming, there are jet streams of old worlds seeping into the tenuous present. I remember of then more than I know of now: hours were folded by card games, days devoted to drama, and weeks wet with the happy idleness of skipping tuitions and classes for, like I said, the greater good. I remember: being instructed to pick up the McDonald’s our seniors had gotten delivered, but having, wonderfully, lost my shoes somewhere in school. My friend (loyal as ever) and I had then trekked barefooted through Fort in cement softened by freshly sodden leaves, not even trying to dodge the falling rain and honking cars, letting the moment be all that we were. And with tunic-over-PE-uniform, Bata-less-feet-muddied-toes-wrinkly, hairband-hanging-around-neck, there was a french fry feast. Look. Before I understood depth, I knew ease. The art of uncomplicated being.

Our immortal principal would taunt us at assemblies: do you children recognise the legacy that has been passed on to you? No, I would think, not really. Illustrious alumni plucked from paginated modern history were not really the concern of a 14-year-old who routinely failed Chemistry scheduled tests. Now, with the help of Mr Rushdie’s warm romanticism and gifted gab, I am beginning to see, to feel, to wade in the trenches of tradition. Buried in buildings breaking with anachronistic beauty, I feel footsteps of past lives when I walk through these heady spiral staircases. Then, there was breezy Meaning. Handed to me with a stapled script. Measured by able elders. Weighted with achievable expectations.

I’ll likely never stop loving how much I lived at that time, recklessly, embarrassingly, and without a second thought. I painted over the lines, I slipped on stairs in front of Important People, and I didn’t blend my makeup the first time I tried wearing it to a party. I didn’t get the lead roles but there was hot glory in everything anyway. I didn’t think about myself, I just found it, with my hair tucked into a starched cap, March Past in biting grass, laughing through torrid training. I leapt on wooden stages, and cheered with my whole chest, I was silly in my seductions, and bad at my equations, I was. I was. I had every dream alive on every surface of my skin, there was nothing in the light but more. I wasn’t scared of past present future, the angst of Meaning didn’t hang over my body, there was nowhere I couldn’t go in my mind, and no one who didn’t know me in my heart.

And now it is clear that I suffer from the same hamartia Saleem did - that narcissism typical of students of political science and readers-of-books, where I have rendered Purpose a fate powered by proximity. To say nothing, I know, of privilege. Wilson house’s musical, whose title eludes me, ended up coming last. It was pouring defeat as we moored onto the quadrangle afterwards for a post-loss pep talk. Teary-eyed or simply wet, my seniors forgave us and themselves, chalking it up to bad luck and too-steep ambition. We’ll definitely win Athletics, they assured us, and, muggy and mystified, we believed them. Per ardua ad astra.

June in Bombay. Changing governments suffocate the streets. I saw children getting onto a school bus and I cried a little. Fatwas have been issued, and fates have been fractured. Bombay is more, and has always been more, than a floating city produced by filmfare and powdered postcolonialism. I look outside and Saleem’s catchphrase has proven difficult to stomach. To understand just one life, how could I possibly swallow the whole world?

The retrospective is rich and renewable and refractive. I will forever have these shared universal histories with the season and the sunset and Saleem and Mr Rushdie; they fill up my heart enough to keep it beating as allegorical and ambitious as the high seas. But there are police falling from the sky and when rainwater touches my feet I screech. I have lost the art of uncomplicated being. As much as I yearn for it, there are other arts clawing and biting at the skyline of the times. The monsoon was late this year, and serenity was designed for memory and mythology. Saleem, child of midnight and South Bombay socialism, realises in the end, “I was taught, harshly, once-and-for-all, the lesson of No Escape; now, seated harshly in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am.”

Childhood thrives in Cathedrals and Bombays, where success within the finite walls feels a lot like infinity. But Mr Rushdie is right: “another sound is swelling now, deafening, insistent; the sound of seconds passing, of an approaching, inevitable midnight.” So it is time to separate the breathing past from the breathless present. To treat life like a project, where dreams and duty and discipline do not come with cartographers. The wild gods of existentialism urge me to Make Meaning instead of trying to find it. Per ardua ad astra. Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Someday perhaps I will learn its cadence and make its poetry. But for now, as the sun sinks into the Arabian Sea, and my mother joins me in the balcony, the words of old worlds stream from me like a monsoon, and I will not stir. I will drink my tea, read my book, and let the strange tenderness of the moment be all that I am.