Scent of a woman

A few years ago when Makrand Deshpandersquos theatre group Ansh had reached a milestone I had written a personal impressions kind of piece on him for the Prithvi Theatre newsletter Prithvi has always been his stomping ground but for an occasional foray south Mumbaiwards he didnrsquot even feel the need to extend the reach of his theatre outside the charmed circle of his admirers in Juhu Still he is considered one of the foremost Hindi playwrights and directorsThis year Ansh celebrated its 21st anniversary with a 10play festival which was a major achievement for the usually laidback guy who knows there are enough people to exult on his behalf the many who started their theatre careers with him and look upon him as a guruA scene from Kasturi the first Makrand Deshpande play that seemed complete in ideas and executionBack in 2011 I had written My first encounter with Makrand Deshpande was a quarrel He had acted in a play called Mahim Ki Khadi on which I had made a comment with which he disagreed The next time I met him he had set up his own group written a play and directed it For the next few years he was madly prolific His early plays like Dev Vanar Airawat Samrangan were inspired by mythology and written in the beautiful poetic Hindi of a scholar not that of a young man whose mother tongue was not Hindi but Marathi His other plays like Ek Kadam Aage Dream Man Kutte Ki Maut were abstract mostly unstructured worksinprogress that he would be polishing right till the time the show opened And then would shut them down as quickly because as he explained ldquoI have lots of plays waiting to be donerdquo All written in long hand on lined paperWhen asked what his new play was about he would give some jumbled answer and say ldquoNow you make sense of itrdquo After reading what has been written he would quip ldquoI understand my own play nowrdquoHe laughed when people said they didnrsquot understand his plays but still enjoyed them It was true his ideas were unique his production design crazily imaginative with Vijay and Teddy Maurya and actors clamoured to work with him because nobody else was writing plays like his Ratna Pathak Sonali Kulkarni Sudhir Pande Saurabh Shukla Anurag Kashyap Kay Kay Menon Mita Vashisht Mona Ambegaonkar acted in his plays because he was such an exciting playwright and director unpredictable eccentric unstoppably creative His pace and energy were nurtured by Prithvi Theatre so much so that he did not care to step out of that comfort zoneThe first Makrand Deshpande play that seemed complete in ideas and execution was Kasturi and a little after that when plays like Sir Sir Sarla and Sa Hi Besura were appreciated he admitted that he had started writing plays that were accessible He slowed down his frantic writing and started running his plays for longer periods and also taking an occasional peek outside Prithvi Quality now took precedence over quantity Still Makrand must have set a record for having written and produced the largest number of plays about 45 at last count in the shortest span of time Hersquos not the same mad restless ontheedge Makrand but he is not complacent or static yet His habit of coming up with startlingly original ideas is tempered with an understanding of audience tastes and boxoffice demands mdash not to the extent of selling out but to the point where his audiences say that they understood his play and enjoyed itAt this festival he revived Kasturi with a new cast and with suitable upgradations The earlier production in the late nineties had Ratna Pathak Shah Sudhir Pande and Mona Ambegaonkar the new one has Makrand himself in the role of a cop and a fictional forest officer Shalini Vatsa plays the buttonedup author Maya and Chitrangada Chakraborty is her sexy alter ego KasturiIn essence Kasturi is like the famous N Richard Nash play The Rainmaker in which a plain woman discovers love but thatrsquos where the similarity ends Maya is the kind of woman who lives her life according to a timetable she dresses in severe dullcoloured clothes and creates an uninspiring romance in the book she is writing that has a forest officer hero with the odd name of Tiger Nawab In life her sprightly lsquosisterrsquo Kasturi leads her to a cop Dhurandhar Wagh and nudges her into acknowledging and expressing her sexuality Kasturi means musk a rare and exotic scent found in the gland of the musk deer mdash here it signifies the spirit of femininity a sexual charge that a woman may sometimes be unaware of but when the right man comes along he can sense it Maya is of course the illusion that the writer creates in her mind but cannot bring it out of her computer into her lifeLike so many Makrand Deshpande plays this one too has a teasing quality to it inviting the audience to ask and answer their own questions about Maya and Kasturi and their somewhat scruffy lsquoPrincersquo whose task for winning the lsquoPrincessrsquo involves not aiming an arrow at the eye of the fish but changing a light bulb in an inebriated state Maybe todayrsquos woman would much rather prefer a man who may not be able to speak of love but is handy around the houseDeepa Gahlot is an awardwinning film and theatre critic and an arts administrator She tweets at deepagahlot