Tag: fiction

Translated by Krishna Manavalli, Two Plays brings together two of the most celebrated stories from award-winning playwright Chandrasekhar Kambar.

The first play, The Bringer of Rain: Rishyashringya, tells the story of a village afflicted with a deadly famine eagerly awaits the arrival of the chieftain’s son, whose homecoming promises the return of rain.

The second play, Mahmoud Gawan, is set in the fifteenth-century Bahamani Sultanate, it follows Gawan’s rise to fame during a time of intense civil strife when empires routinely rose and fell.

Find a glimpse of the story in Kambar’s first play in the excerpt below!

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From the play, ‘The Bringer of Rain: Rishyashringa’

Act I

SUTRADHARA: Brothers seated and brothers standing there!

We’re just raw youth, who came here

And right away got on to the stage.

The one who wrote our play is no seasoned

poet,

The ones who act are ignorant lads

If they slip up or go wrong,

Please don’t clap and laugh

And don’t try that gleeful double-whistle!

No, don’t even ask what kind of play this is!

If you don’t get it, don’t drag your chairs and

Yawn

We make no claims to poetic finesse,

But with love, we give you our little message.

Just think that this play was born here

amidst us.

Bear with us for a bit, forgive the flaws.

And you, our elders here, we salute you again!

(He breaks a coconut in a ritual manner and throws the bits on both sides of the stage. By now, it is getting dark. Village entrance. On the right of the stage, you see a raised platform. Backstage, you see a crowd. The people in the crowd are not interested in the Prelude taking place on the fore-stage. With a vacant look in their eyes, they move slowly and gather around the platform once the Prelude is over. In the Prelude, the acting, dialogue and the manner should all follow the style of the traditional folk play

Srikrishnaparijatha)

SUTRADHARA: How can I tell you of this? And how can I not?

Whatever I say, our words will sound

Like the clatter of broken pots and pans,

You miss the inner voice here, I know.

We say something, it means another thing—

True, there’s no rhyme or reason! But we can’t

walk away from this

We try to grasp ‘it’ in our words, grasp it and

see!

We struggle hard, yet when we open our lips

We are saying something, and you are hearing

another thing.

Of course, you make sense of nothing!

Where did we start, and where did we end?

All right, enough of this rant, let’s get to

business

We’ll go on the stage to act, but the play isn’t

new

If you ask me, so what? Life’s a play too, right?

Our faces are the theatres where this drama

unfolds,

God, what a lot of the daily drama!

Starts in the morning and goes on till you go

to bed

What pretensions, what masks!

Oh, True God, I pray to you,

Make the inside and outside seamless and

one!

But who knows, where, how, and in which

cave He is hiding!

Meanwhile, we talk, drink, eat and walk—

We don’t know who we are, do we?

Sometimes, when we bathe in the well—

We seem to recognize ourselves in the water.

And stretch our hands to touch it,

When we try to touch, it slips from our grasp,

When we try to grasp, it slithers from our

hold,

In the end, you just want to pinch your nose

and weep.

But weeping when you see a corpse is such an

old custom!

Anyway, what do we do now?

In the big mortar house, a huge tiger has

got in

There isn’t a drop of rain, there’s no crop in

the field.

The seeds we planted are burnt, the parched

earth is cracked,
With cracks like so many gaping mouths!
People’s faces look burnt, the green fields
have all gone dry.

Two Plays is a must-read for anyone wishing to dip a toe into the rich water of Kannada storytelling and folklore!

Kunwar Narain’s unusual short stories broke new ground and rejuvenated the genre when they appeared on the Indian literary landscape in 1971. Half a century later, in vivid English translation for the first time, they seem just as far-reaching: sometimes in the novelty of their insight, sometimes in their transcendence, sometimes in the world views they together uncover.

Read an excerpt from the short story ‘The Court of Public Opinion’ below:

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Sadiq Miyan managed to keep his motives in check at first, but then they went awry. A completely new bicycle, stood completely unclaimed—without even a lock to guard it! He glanced around once, then ran his hand over the bike’s glittering handle, as if caressing the mane of a magnificent Arabian horse. He couldn’t hold back any longer, and jumped on the bike. No one objected, nor noticed; and, well, what could the poor bike say either? He pushed down on the pedal lightly. The youthful cycle was ready to take off with him right away. The people nearby came and went by as usual, just as before.

Sadiq Miyan spurred the bicycle on, and it began to fly like the wind. It was his now.

But, alas, what an awful stroke of bad luck! An endless herd of buffaloes came along, straying right into the middle of the road. Sadiq Miyan lost control and collided with one of the stoutest in the bunch—head-on. What could he do, the poor guy? He hit the ground—his own injury less, the cycle’s, more. Bent and broken, the wheel went from being hoop-shaped to heap-like. The handle, twisted backwards, gazed at the seat, and the mudguard took on a look as if it were not a part of the bike but of the buffalo. The buffalo stood in stunned silence; Sadiq Miyan glanced nervously at the crippled bike. What could he do? He’d really landed himself in a strange sort of trouble. It crossed his mind to abandon the bike and make a run for it. After all, it was only the bike that was broken—nothing wrong with his legs!

But in the meantime, a crowd began to gather all around him, as was only natural. Running just then would have meant getting himself in more trouble. Two, four, six . . .dozens of women, men and children began surrounding him. In the middle lay the mangled bike; with the buffalo, chewing cud, on one side, and Sadiq Miyan, head reeling, on the other.

At first, the people pitied the bike that was now a mess, then their hearts were kindled with compassion for Sadiq Miyan, and finally, they got angry at the buffalo. Because there was clear evidence before them of what happens when one locks horns with a buffalo, they decided to tackle the herdboy instead. It was because of him that the hazard of something like a buffalo had sprung up in the middle of the road, and someone upright like a Sadiq Miyan had become the victim of that hazard.

By consensus, it was decided that they should fix the herdboy properly, right then and there. But Sadiq Miyan objected: in his view, it was more important to fix the bicycle first—and the herdboy should be made to do that. Everyone agreed.

The crowd lifted the bike tenderly and delivered it to a nearby cycle hospital with great care, where its wounds were treated for a cost of ten rupees. But when the herdboy was told to cough up the money, he expressed his inability to do so, and asked how on earth was he supposed to come up with ten rupees when he hadn’t even ten paise to his name then?

Confronted by this new problem, an extraordinary debate took place among the ordinary folk assembled there; so many arguments all at once that it was practically impossible to make out any argument clearly. Nevertheless, one solution somehow seemed to survive intact: whatever the herdboy was wearing should be sold to cover the penalty cost of the repairs.

This too was easier said than done, because the herdboy had nothing but a dhoti around his waist and a lathi in his hand. Even if both these items were taken, it wouldn’t be enough.

Anyhow, after the cycle had recovered, it was agreed that Sadiq Miyan and the cycle should be considered free from the whole dust-up. This was deemed incontestable not only in the eyes of the public, but also in the eyes of the luckless bicycle mechanic, who now, having taken the entire burden of Sadiq Miyan’s ten-rupee misadventure on his own head, was an eager prosecutor of the blameworthy herdboy. As for the public, it was surely commendable that not a single person there was willing to step back until final justice had been delivered, no matter what.

Some wise guy then repeated the suggestion that, if it satisfied the cycle mechanic, the herdboy could also be handily fixed, with a flogging worth ten rupees! But nobody paid much mind to this idiocy, though the herdboy was entirely willing to go along. Everyone’s attention was stuck on the intricate problem at hand: how could they wring ten rupees from the herdboy in his present condition?

One gentleman, who had perhaps trained as a lawyer, or was capable of being a lawyer, came up with a novel proposal: by selling that same buffalo which had given rise to all this mess, the cost of the fine could be recovered. The idea wasn’t unreasonable, and his submission was accepted.

The buffalo again became the centre of attention. For five minutes, the people waited. But where would they find a ready buyer for a thing as big as a buffalo? A buffalo isn’t some wad of paan, a bidi or a cigarette that can be purchased along the road, tucked in one’s pocket, and hung along with the pocket on a peg on some wall back home. It was a matter of responsibility, which could go as far as spelling fortune or disaster for one’s offspring. Second, who had the cash on hand worth a buffalo at this time? As a result, this attempt at justice proved unsuccessful as well.

Around now, everyone was sorely feeling the need for some kind of mastermind in the crowd. A few sights fell on one particular gentleman, and remained on him. He certainly looked like a wiseacre—though some others pegged him as a daydreaming wiseass. They held a vote; and it was decided that he was indeed a wiseacre, not a wiseass, though he himself kept claiming to be nothing less than a prophet.

What will happen next? You’ll have to read The Play of Dolls to find out!