She laughed till she choked. A naatak-nutty aunt I trundled in tow with, for almost every Gujarati play possible, was an asthma patient. Mid-show she would guffaw aloud—heaving heartily, then heavily, at the farce unfolding on stage. That set off a paroxysm nursed with a pill pulled from her sequinned purse. Spasm fixed in a bit, she resumed chortling at the shenanigans. After an attack in the middle of a 1970s show in Tejpal Auditorium, she huff-puffed: "Marvaanu toh chhej, hasta ramta javaanu We have to die anyway, might as well go laughing like this."

In her lexicon, "like this" meant while watching a Parsi play. Which was wonderfully often in that half-century-ago heyday when audiences were regaled year-round with sparkling comedies. At least four prolific writers presented a rollicking oeuvre—Pheroze Antia, Adi Marzban, Dorab Mehta and Homi Tavadia. Unlike the literary famine today, which, barring a few original scripts by playwrights like Meherzad Patel, sees poorly rehashed plays of that formidable quartet. This too in the week of Navroze alone.