If I Had to Tell It Again

by Gayathri Prabhu

  She is now standing at the very edge of the platform. S swirls around and the stage is suddenly blacked out.

  S (speaks in the dark): Wait! Please. Don’t do it! … Please stay where you are. It never ends with a leap, it gets worse. Let me tell you more – about the restlessness, the fear, the anxiety, the discontent … Wait, give me a chance to explain it all over again. Let me put you in a story, a story about love and choices. Let me make this all better for you. Let me tell you how it really ends.

  Silence.

  SCENE TWO

  The stage is dimly lit. There are some chairs and two side tables placed haphazardly. The platform and ladder stay in place. On the opposite side of the stage is a study table with an open laptop that is turned on.

  W is moving around the stage, rearranging chairs. She is humming to herself. She fusses over one chair for a few seconds, moves it around and steps back.

  W: Ready! Lights! (the whole stage is lit, and there is extra brightness on the chair she has adjusted, like a spotlight) Enter!

  She is waiting expectantly and looking towards the stage wing but nothing happens.

  W (shouts again, louder): Enter!

  M walks out, smiles widely at her and the audience.

  M: It feels so good to be out here on stage again. So good.

  W (handing him a sheaf of papers from the table, which he does not take): Just because it is a rehearsal doesn’t mean you take it easy. You are the one who wanted to do this, remember? (looking at the papers) Okay, let’s start from Scene Two. Your lines first …

  M sits down and starts to talk. W sits down as well, to listen. It is not clear if the lines are from the pages or his own. He speaks theatrically and at the audience.

  M: I used to be in the dramatics club of our college, you know. I was cast as the heroine in every play. Long slender limbs, hairless chest, narrow hips, large expressive eyes – I made a beautiful woman, they said. And for days they talked about the clothes I wore – a short skirt, a brocade sari, chiffon dupattas…

  W: You are an old man now.

  M (as if realizing it just then): An old man …

  W: I did not mean it like that. You have told me about the college days a million times, and we have so much work to do here.

  M: I don’t like this role. (waves the pages) It is about a father and a daughter – he is a retired bank manager, he drinks, and he is unreasonable. Any fool can tell what is going to happen in the next act – he is going to die! It sounds just like us and it is completely unsympathetic to the father.

  W: Not everything is predictable. You know he is going to die, but you don’t know when or how …

  M: Do you know?

  W (first with some annoyance, and then with sadness): Yes. He will be sixty-six years and three months old. It will be in the middle of a muggy April night. He will be lying across the laps of his friends, on the back seat of a car, as the blood starts to rise up his gullet …

  M stands up abruptly.

  M (softly, as if speaking to himself): So soon …

  W: And he was not bedridden, not even for a day. It was exactly like he wanted.

  M: Exactly like I wanted …

  He gets up and starts to walk away. Turns around to ask one important question.

  M: Was I … did this character feel afraid to die?

  W (nods and says softly): Yes …

  M slowly walks away but stops at the edge of the stage. She watches him go.

  W: Lights out!

  Lights go out, but there is enough light to see the two figures.

  M: What happens afterwards?

  W: Before matters more than after …

  M: You are avoiding my question.

  W: I don’t know. I haven’t written it yet.

  Silence.

  W: I am sorry to be putting you on stage like this. But you have always loved the limelight. You love to be admired. You love to be pitied. You need the lights to be yourself. Like a sunflower under a travelling sun.

  M: Sunsets are a punishment. It is after the sun goes down that the evening turns lonely, very lonely. I would freeze to death if it were not for the lights. The lights – can you please turn back the lights?

  W: A little girl watched you slip into the dark, into the cold. You shivered, literally, your teeth clattered, curled up on the sofa, knees folded towards your chest – you were sinking and all she could do was watch.

  M: The lights please …

  W: That was years and years ago, and yet … yes, yes, lights!

  A dim spotlight comes on at the top of the platform. M hurries to the ladder, starts to climb. When he reaches the top, he sits down in the spotlight, rubs his arms as if to warm himself and watches W.

  Meanwhile, W has turned on a table lamp (her area of the stage is lit up as the lamp comes on).

  M: This is perfect! A great view! I get to watch you, like I have watched you since the day you were born.

  W: Fine, watch, but stay quiet and don’t jump …

  M: Why would I jump?

  W: It is the sort of thought that comes to a person at an elevation.

  M (cautiously): Is it a thought that has come to you?

  W (annoyed): How can I write if you keep chattering like this!

  She sits down at a computer, types for a little while, and then stops as if in the middle of a thought. She never looks at M when she talks – it is either an aside to herself or spoken into the void.

  W: There was a time I thought it would be the smart thing to do, a quick way to go. We lived in a high-rise – the walls were unendurable and the space outside the balcony was inviting. Flight. But it did not seem right that the children in the building got to see a splattered woman on the sidewalk … Maybe it would work better, I thought, if one were to swallow all those medicines in the drawer, all at once …

  M: What are you saying? (agitated) Wasn’t it enough that I have obsessed over dying … so that nobody I love has to do it … I have obsessed for all of us …

  W: Your method took years and years, decades really …

  M: What other way is there? Why are you talking like this? I can bear anything, but I cannot bear that your life should look like mine …

  W is silent.

  M: Have pity on me … tell me more, tell me all …

  W: I never told you what happened. I never found the words. It was summer and I was at this river island, researching for a novel I was writing. I found myself on top of a bridge, looking down at the swirling depths of the Kaveri. The river was brimming with my sorrows. And more than anything else in the world, I wanted to jump, to end it all …

  M (wistfully, longingly): Oh, to end it all …

  W: I knew then that I needed help. I went home, the darkness like a lump of lead in my stomach, heavy, growing heavier, swallowing me up. I did not want to see a psychiatrist, but there was no choice, and he sent me to the psychologist, and I did not want to go there either. It took me a long while to know I was ill, and then it took me a long while to want to get well. All the shadows closed in, all at the same time …

  M: Somehow we have to bear our burdens …

  W: It was unbearable, this rising tide of despair and hopelessness. I could not forgive myself, I could not forgive him.

  M (looking visibly distressed): Nobody told us anything. We called your house, we spoke to your husband – he said you had gone to your sister’s house. But we knew something was wrong. An astrologer told us this was your darkest time.

  W: It was my darkest time. But what was the use of telling you? You lived in your own darkness. You never came to see me. I was dying.

  M: I too was dying.

  W: I could not breathe. Inky, viscous, it started here (placing her hand on her stomach) like a deep, bottomless hole, a well of black water that kept boiling over, over and over. (Her hand moves slowly up from her stomach, to her chest, her neck, her mouth; then just above her nose, it stops) I could not breathe.

  M: I have lived like that for y
ears.

  W: I have seen you live like that for years. How did you do it? How could you help me?

  M: I came to see you at your sister’s house. It was terrifying. Your hair, your beautiful long hair, was gone, your neck was in a brace, you did not smile, you had shrunk, your collarbones jutted out from your t-shirt, when you looked at me your eyes were empty and unlit.

  W: You were shocked …

  M: I was shocked …

  W: I could not share what was between husband, wife and a festering relationship. That day you did not want to talk about my suffering, only about the possibilities of patching up, of a future that could work out differently. The astrologer had told you that somehow I had to make it work till the month of March, just six more months, then everything would be okay. You pleaded – go, go back to your husband, all will be well if you go …

  M: You looked at me as though I was a stranger, you said –

  W: If I go I am not going to make it to March. You will lose a daughter …

  He buries his head in his palms and stays that way for a while. Slowly the lights go off on him.

  W: You could not say much else to me that day. You left by the evening train. Later, Amma told me you reached home and sobbed your heart out. She said she had never seen you cry like that.

  Silence

  W: You did not ask me to come home. You thought this would make me go back to the husband I had run away from. No money, no roof, I started again from scratch. I packed my bags and went to live somewhere in the Himalayan foothills. I felt like an orphan.

  Silence. She tries to look for him but it is dark on the platform.

  W: But all this was a long time ago. It took years but I found a way out of that tunnel, towards health, towards love.

  M: I was overjoyed when you decided to try marriage again.

  W: But you … why did you never try to believe again?

  M: Maybe I did and maybe you did not want to see it.

  W: You kept pointing me to the lit end of the tunnel, the circle of light, but you turned around and walked into the other end, the cavernous unlit hole. You never emerged. (pause) Hello? Hello? Are you still there? I can’t do this play by myself, you know. Hello?

  She gets up and paces. Goes over to the table, shuffles through the papers there, picks out a sheet and speaks aloud, like a soliloquy, no longer addressing M.

  You see, people die in many different ways. They can die slowly, the life draining out of them, one trickle at a time. They can thunder – ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’ – and exit to echoing applause. They might have a moment of peace, a gentle stopping of a heart that is fatigued by years of labour. Some get to make their deathbed speech. A few are ready to go but are rigged up by hospital machines, cajoled, jolted, suspended in almost-life or almost-death. People may starve to death, or be felled by an evil hand or a sudden accident. When you die of old age, all the organs of the body slowly start to shut down, like a theatre after the last performance. In the slowest of deaths, every gasp is counted, every flicker of the eyelid. Or there is the dying that comes with a body ripened with terminal illness, unyielding to medicine, unresponsive to will. Death itself is stillness, lost breath, a flat line. Death matters less than dying. You see, people die in many different ways.

  I was thirty-one and absolutely certain that I would not live to be thirty-two. The road had taken too many wrong turns. Hardly had one trauma healed when another burst forth. I could not bear to look in the mirror, I could not bear to be in my own skin. It seemed acutely immoral to take up any more space in the world, consume even one more ounce of oxygen. After months of feeling completely flawed and helpless, this decision to end life felt like the one perfect moment of control. Perfect calm came with perfect certainty. It was time to go.

  Lights fade out.

  SCENE THREE

  All three characters are on stage. M and W are sitting on two stools placed at a distance of a few feet from one another, each in a pool of light. S is sitting on the platform, dangling her feet. She wears a black hat pulled low over her head. She is not lit but a spotlight falls on a pile of books very close to her that she is rearranging.

  In the foreground are two black curtains to cover each half of the stage; both are now pulled back.

  W (writing in a notebook on her lap as she speaks): Loneliness. A woman’s loneliness. Managing relationships, managing a family, managing a career, managing life … and in the centre of all this managing is a loneliness that cannot be managed. A loneliness that never goes away. How does one begin to explain it?

  M and S talk rapidly, nearly overlapping each other’s words. W continues to write.

  S: It’s your imagination. You think too much.

  M: A man feels lonely too. It’s nothing.

  S: It’s nothing.

  M: It’s your imagination.

  S: Go out.

  M: Make more friends. Take up a job. Forget the past. You are going to make me proud, I know it.

  S: Just relax.

  M: Try not to think too much.

  S: Trust me. I know all your secrets …

  W drops her books and pen, gets up and quickly walks across the stage.

  M: It must be my fault. I taught you to succeed. I goaded you. But when things went wrong … I did not teach you to fail. How could I? I did not know what to do with failure myself. We should learn from others, those who make the formula look so simple – get a job, get married, have children, build homes, retire, grow old, die.

  W closes the curtain on S’s side of the stage as M is talking. She comes back to her seat and looks at the audience instead of M when she talks, but his eyes are always on her.

  W: How can you say that? Life is also poetry, music, art, a monsoon cloud, a bird on my windowsill …

  M: Did I teach you that?

  W: You taught me to live like a glass bowl – completely transparent, always willing to accommodate others, fragile in thoughtless hands.

  M: When you left home, I was certain you would find your way. When you found a mate, I was certain he was worthy of you. When you drifted, I thought that was what all gifted individuals do. You drifted …

  W: I was a kite, precocious, but I did not know the power of the wind, I did not know clouds are just vapours …

  She stands, mimicking the release of a kite above her head and M gently holds out his hands as if he were holding the string.

  M: But you took flight …

  W: Yes, a kite that was free to float away in the blue…

  M: And mine was the sorrow of the earth losing to the sky … (a brief silence as they both watch the same imaginary kite fly) I could not track the wind currents or your flight. You tugged and the string was cutting into my fingers. I let go … (his hands drop suddenly)

  W (slumping back on her stool): In truth, I was not flying but drowning. There is this thing – this shadow – and deep nightfall in my head … drowning, drowning …

  M: What shadow? Is it me?

  W: It sounds like my own voice but it feels like you. This sadness you have felt for years, I have known it too. Even if you go, even if I stay well, there will be others like us.

  M: Nobody will understand.

  W: It is too late. The story is being told and there are listeners out there.

  W gets up and while M talks she draws open the curtain covering the ladder. S is now sitting on a middle rung of the ladder. The spotlight is on S, head bent low, a black lumpy shape. W returns to her stool.

  M (talking as W is moving the curtains; now looking at her pleadingly): We are different, you and I, we are alike. We want to do our best, we want to believe the best in everyone. Let’s keep it like that. They will never look at us the same way again.

  W: So many people you have helped. So many acts of generosity without any expectations. So much outpourings of love. Where was everyone when you started to crack, when you shattered?

  M: Hush. It was our lot to endure.

  W: It is not t
oo much to ask – to ask for empathy …

  M: Hush. You are asking for the world! They will think you weak. Why plead?

  W: It is the strong people who struggle, who pay a price for pushing against the current – the depressed are not weak-minded.

  M: I am NOT depressed.

  W: How can I convince anyone if you continue to deny it? Maybe it starts with accepting the illness.

  M: No. And you are wrong to accept it for me. What comes next?

  W: We need to see a doctor. You need help with this.

  M: No.

  W: Yes.

  M: No.

  W: I am sorry for forcing a word on you that is mine, that belongs to modern medicine but not to your life. What chance do we stand if we do not speak together? It will go unsaid …

  M: Always so stubborn! Why humiliate me like this? I fought and resisted any kind of disappointment, and there was an avalanche of those. Sure, I intoxicated myself to cope, but that is not illness. All I have at the end of a long struggle is an idea of my own courage and fortitude. Don’t take that away from me!

  W: I am sorry, I have to do this.

  M: Why hurt the family? Why not let it go?

  W: Because. The hurt has already happened and the sharing is a possibility of healing. Sometimes I too wish to forget, so that it never has to be said. If one stirs and cooks it long enough, it will evaporate, disappear. That has been the hope all these years, but it only condenses, sticks to the bottom of the pot, rots there. Silence will seal its fate.

  M: Talking has been my undoing. Writing is yours. It is a good thing you have no children. I wish I had none!

  W gets up with a start, turns away, her head bent with the weight of silence and thought. At this S scampers down to the floor of the stage.

  W (standing between M and S): What if this is a loneliness not caused by anyone but myself? What if this is a loneliness that never goes away?