How Benegal turned an '80s train ride into a journey of self-discoveries

For my weekly column in Mirror/TOI Plus, the seventh piece in a series on trains in Indian cinema: 

Shyam Benegal's thought-provoking television series Yatra gave the Indian Railways a stellar role, as the thread that stitches the country together

 

Yatra, the 15-episode series telecast on Doordarshan in 1986, may be the most dedicated depiction of the Indian train journey on screen. Directed by Shyam Benegal, the profoundly memorable show was based on a screenplay by his longtime screenwriter Shama Zaidi and theatre director and playwright Sunil Shanbag. It was sponsored by the Indian Railways, which gave Benegal the use of a 10-bogey train for the 50-day shoot.

Benegal decided to have the show unfold – consecutively -- on two of the longest journeys you could make by rail in India at the time: On the Himsagar Express, which ran from Kanyakumari, at the southernmost tip of India, to Jammu in the north; and the Tripura Express, which ran from west to east, from Jaisalmer to Guwahati. We begin the journey with the Himsagar Express, in Kanyakumari, where Lance Naik Gopalan Nair -- Om Puri playing a Malayali armyman posted in Jammu -- misses his train. Gopalan and his wife's frenetic taxi ride to catch up with the train at the next station (and when they miss it there, the next one) is one of many delightful narratorial devices in Yatra -- among other things, enabling Benegal's brilliant cinematographer Jehangir Chowdhury to shoot the train from the outside.

  

Inside, on the moving train, we meet a cast of characters as varied as the country -- many of them revealing to us an aspect of the country's troubles, small or large. The telling is gentle, but the stories are powerful. An old Marathi couple who have just lost their daughter to dowry murder find themselves taking care of a young Punjabi woman (a marvellous Neena Gupta) who is escaping ill-treatment by her mother-in-law and trying to get to her natal home in Jalandhar before she delivers a baby. A theatre troupe that has just lost a crucial actor to Bombay is trying to get the play back on track before getting to Delhi for a performance scheduled at the National School of Drama. An ageing, unwell Hindu ascetic is being accompanied to Jammu by his devoted disciple (played by the wonderful Mohan Gokhale) because he wants to see the Himalayas one last time. A Muslim husband who has been wanting his doctor wife to give up her medical practice finds himself unexpectedly affected by helping her deliver a baby.

As a child of the 1980s, I remember being entranced by Yatra, recognising its difference from the cinematic content around me without being able to name that difference. The beautifully-captured train journey allows you to travel vicariously through the country. And many of the things that Benegal brought into the narrative were not things that found space in mainstream, popular culture. As the train moves from the Andhra region towards the jungles of Madhya Pradesh, for instance, we are introduced to an activist for minimum wages for adivasi labourers who has attracted the ire of landlords in Nellore district. Now a whisteblower on the run, Venugopal is taking some documents to Delhi – but there's a bunch of goons who know he is on the train. Even to a child who knew nothing of the world, it was somehow clear that these goons – perfectly ordinary looking, mostly unspeaking, not particularly large or muscular – were more dangerous than the henchmen the villain sent out in Hindi cinema. Even today, it is chilling to watch the scene where Venugopal gets dragged out of the train while everyone else is distracted by a theft.

There is a lovely unpredictability to Yatra's narrative, however, in which such moments of gravity and fear can segue into humour and joy – and sometimes the opposite. And as often happens when you spend some time together, people you might have dismissed at first glance begin to seem human, vulnerable, perhaps even worthy of admiration. Benegal achieves some of this empathy through Om Puri's Gopalan, who serves as a conscientious but opinionated narrator. Thus the ailing swamiji, whom Gopalan thinks is all talk, turns out to have once fought in Subhash Bose's Indian National Army. The theatre troupe, whom the Armyman dismisses as having no serious work, is actually the only group of people who are working throughout the train ride. Their frazzled stage manager (the dependably superb Harish Patel) seems like a drunken buffoon who can't possibly be coached to act – but after an accident brings him to his senses, the whole compartment watches him transform into Ashwatthama.

But as in life, so on the Indian Railways: Everyone has their own journey to complete. The characters get on the train, learn something of each other's lives, and then part when their destinations arrive. Yet something meaningful is often forged in that fortuitous intersection of time and space. A young man heading to a job interview becomes besotted by a pretty young co-passenger, wooing her silently in the presence of her oblivious parents while making up verbose dream sequences with her in his head. The Marathi couple are so clearly taking care of the pregnant Neena Gupta that the railway doctor and others constantly mistake them for her parents. Later, Om Puri's Gopalan, trying to follow up with the railway authorities on the disappeared Venugopal, is asked the same question. “Aapke koi rishtedaar thhe?” Puri pauses, and his silence contains multitudes. “No,” he responds quietly. “We only met on the train.”

Published in Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune Mirror/TOI Plus, 30/29 May 2021.

A Report on the 14th Bharat Rang Mahotsav

A still from Insha ka Intezaar, a Pakistani adaptation of Waiting for Godot

This year’s festival of theatre at the National School of Drama (NSD), the 14^th Bharat Rang Mahotsav, staged 88 plays in total, including 14 productions that commemorated Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. Within India, while English, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi were as usual better represented than other languages, there were productions to be seen in Tamil, Malayalam, Manipuri, Kannada, Kashmiri, Mizo and Tulu, as well as several non-verbal performances. The international round-up included plays from South Africa (Inkosazana, a lively collaboration between the University of Cape Town and fellowship students from the NSD), Nepal (a solo performance of Sara Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis), Afghanistan (an adaptation of The Little Prince in Dari) China (Peking Opera), the United Kingdom (Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon) and three productions from Poland (among them Pawel Demirski’s In the Name of Jakub S., Marta Gornicka’s Chorus of Women).

Given the enormous number of plays staged (often clashing with each other), it is impossible to watch more than a small fraction of what is on offer. Of necessity, therefore, what follows is a fairly committed theatregoer’s idiosyncratic report on the plays she did manage to watch (and found interesting).

Among the highlights of this year’s plays was the marvellously energetic Nain Nachaiya, an adaptation of Tirumalnath Aiyulnath’s Sanskrit play Prahasan Kuhuna Bhaikshav directed by Farid Bazmi and performed by Rang Vidushak, Bhopal. Founded in 1984 by the legendary Bansi Kaul, Rang Vidushak describes itself as a “laboratory for clown-theatre”, a space from which to explore the power of laughter. Nain Nachaiya is a classic comedy of mistaken identities and temporary amnesia: the central narrative involves one Bedhang Prasad, who has lost his memory and wanders the kingdom as a faux-yogi called Baba Ghotalu, is eventually restored to his wife, the redoubtable Sawaniya. But as befits a theatre troupe whose work is based on “principles taken from the performing and non-performing art-forms, on indigenous sports, childhood games, rhymes and riddles, the lilt of dialects, the ballads of minstrels, the toughness of akhadebaazi and the flexibility of natgiri”, Nain Nachaiya manages to take an ancient Sanskrit text and make of it something brilliantly entertaining, embedded in the here-and-now by the sharpness of its wit. 

From the self-obsessed king who is himself no less than a vidushak (played brilliantly by Harsh Daand in a style that reminded me of Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne) to the aphorism-coining Baba Ghotalu (a superb Uday Shahane, who delivers such wondrous lines as “Khone aur paane mein kitna sookshm antar hai” or “Nrityam Sharanam Gacchaami” with the enjoyment they deserve), the actors anchor the play’s easy laughter in something deeper. Bansi Kaul’s vibrant set and costumes make the production glorious to look at, and the spectacular set pieces are all performed with aplomb: the jester on stilts, king’s men who do acrobatic stunts with lathis, and my favourite scene: a giant humanoid parrot hovering behind pillars to announce at key moments in a conversation, “Jhooth hai!”.

Like Nain Nachaiya in terms of drawing on folk traditions of performance and storytelling was Molagaapodi (Chilli Powder), a Tamil production based on a novel called Karukku (1992) by the magisterial Dalit writer Bama and directed by debutante director Srijith Sundaram. The women, men and transgender actors who make up the group, Kattiyyakkari (Storyteller) see theatre as an artistic tool to speak up against oppressive structures. The tale of the war between the poor labourer Pachiamma and the rich and stingy Gangamma is enacted with a raw, often bawdy physicality that thrives on exaggerated thrusts and fake beatings. 

It is a young group, and the production is nowhere near as well-appointed or perfectly-tuned as Rang Vidushak’s, but they do a brilliant job with minimal sets, like a sheet with a square cut out of it to create an image of Gangamma at her mansion window. There is true tragedy here, poverty and prejudice and violence as it is lived every minute of every day by so many desperate people in this country. But the play, thankfully, steers clear of the maudlin. Instead, it uses mime and chanting and dance to create a vivid portrait of anger leavened with laughter. The actors’ delivery of dialogues needs work, but there is an irrepressible energy, an innate sense of rhythm that makes up for the moments it goes off-key.

A still from the Tamil play Molagaapodi

The reason I could understand as much I did of Molagaapodi, despite knowing no Tamil, is that the festival now provides an English translation of the dialogue of all plays not in Hindi or English. The translated dialogue runs as supertitles on a screen placed either above the stage (as in Kamani Auditorium), or to the side (as in LTG or Shriram Centre). While the supertitles may not catch matters of dialect or accent or register, it is a wonderful thing to be able to have plays in Polish or Kannada or Mizo attract a substantial audience of non-native speakers.

Emboldened by the supertitles, I watched two Marathi plays this year. They couldn’t have been more different. The first was Gajab Kahani, based on Jose Saramago’s posthumously published novel The Elephant’s Journey. The story is set in 1553. Solomon the elephant, a gift to King Dom Joao III from one of his colonies in India, has been languishing in Lisbon for two years, along with his mahout Subhro, when the Portuguese king decides to dispatch Solomon to Vienna as a gift for the Habsburg ruler. Solomon and Subhro proceed through unfamiliar landscapes, with people everywhere projecting their own agendas and desires onto this previously unseen creature. Beautifully designed and directed by Mohit Takalkar, Gajab Kahani unfolds at the thoughtful, deliberate pace required of Saramago’s wise and tender tale. Aasakta Kalamanch’s actors are very good, especially Geetanjali Kulkarni, who manages the remarkable feat of transforming herself into Solomon, body and soul.

Oddly, the other Marathi production I saw also had actors playing animals. Originally written in Hindi several years ago, Sai Paranjpye’s recently revived Jaswandi is a “cat’s eye of humans”. A hugely popular play with 100 runs to its credit, it tells the rather cliched tale of a neglected housewife who finds herself getting involved with a man ten years her junior. There are some good performances: Swati Bowalekar as the maid Rangabai and Rajesh Kamble as the scheming driver Tanpure.But what saves the play from dreary predictability are the ‘cats’: two mangy strays adopted by Sonia. As in Gajab Kahani, the play uses the imagined perspective of animals as a way to comment on the foibles of humans.

Among the other interesting Indian plays was Lal Baksho (The Red Box), a production created through a workshop by Sohag Sen. The play unfolds as a series of episodes, each revolving around the presence of a red box – in a park, by the roadside, in a train, on a TV serial set. Each playlet is beautifully conceived and the actors are uniformly excellent, perfectly evoking the different characters and their variously splintered relationships within the necessarily brief time they have on stage. But the play doesn’t quite come together, because the notion of terror – ostensibly the theme that unites the various episodes – does not emerge clearly enough. It is only in the episode on the train (where the passengers reveal their deep-seated prejudices when confronted with a need for someone to blame) that the play engages with the dangers of the popular discourse on terror. The rest of the time, the presence of the red box merely draws out the tensions already inherent within a group or in a relationship (and in the last two episodes, it doesn’t even really do that). I think the play would have been better served by not being forced under the ‘terror’ rubric, setting it free to explore the breakdown of relationships and even civility, not as the byproduct of terror but as a subject in itself.

A very different – absurdist – take on contemporary politics came from the Tehreek-i-Niswan production Insha ka Intezar, which managed to adapt Beckett’s Waiting for Godot into a play sharply located in the Pakistani milieu, making two of its integral characters women and turning Pozzo of the original play into a mock-military figure called Mansha, a self-important man in a khaki vardi who is thrilled with the sound of his own voice. He speaks constantly, yet never answers a question that is put to him. Like a Pakistani dictator, Mansha refuses to sit down without being invited to. The world of Insha ka Intezar, in which people see a dried-up tree and think, “Chalo, ise toh nijad mil gayi”, in which people have been waiting for so long that no-one can remember what they were waiting for, is a scathing comment on contemporary Pakistan.

Among other productions from abroad, Ramin Gray’s production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play The Golden Dragon was an extremely unusual one, where a group of six actors switched mannerisms, gaits, and very occasionally, costumes, to create a theatrical fable about migration, set in and around a Chinese takeaway somewhere in Britain. The production is memorable because it forces us to confront its own fictitiousness at every moment. The actors provide spoken introductions to their own characters, interrupting the smooth flow of the narrative and highlighting the construction of the theatrical in true Brechtian fashion.

A still from Chorus of Women

The Chorus of Women, a modern-day tragic chorus of women from Poland, was another innovative and arresting experience. Formed through an open casting call in 2009, the chorus contains 28 women of all ages and experiences and all variety of acting backgrounds. They speak in unison and yet in a multitude of voices, alternately happy, hungry, sad, angry, sexy, tired, argumentative. They give voice to forgotten songs, they work with advertising slogans to produce witty routines (“Grate, chop, squeeze” rising to a crescendo), they retell fairy stories. Sung, shouted, whispered or chanted, the gift of the women’s chorus is to bring a million fragments together in a reimagining of the collective voice. The least conventionally theatrical performance of all – no costumes, no sets, no characters, certainly no plot – was in many ways a necessary reminder that theatre is not constituted by any of these things. All it needs is for us to see and hear. And be moved to think.

(Written for the Feb 2012 issue of Avantika, a Kolkata-based magazine of the performing arts.)

Theatre in Delhi: shout-out for Begam ka Takiya & Kafka: Ek Adhyay

The National School of Drama Repertory Company is wrapping up its annual Summer Theatre Festival in Delhi this week. If you're in Delhi today, try and catch Ranjit Kapoor's splendid Begam ka Takiya (last two shows at 3.30pm and 7.00pm today, that's 12th June, at Kamani Auditorium, Copernicus Marg).

The last play of the festival is Suresh Sharma's highly suggestive production of Asif Ali Haider's Kafka: Ek Adhyay, which I saw in its 2007 avatar and reviewed for Time Out Delhi. You can read that review here though I have a strong suspicion that many of the superb NSD repertory actors I saw then have moved on since. But with such a strong script and visually arresting production, the play still ought to be worth a watch. Kafka: Ek Adhyay plays from 13th to 16th June at 7.00pm at Sammukh, NSD, Bhagwan Das Road.

Stamboul train: Mohan Maharishi's play 'Main Istanbul Hoon'

Published in the theatre pages of Time Out Delhi, Oct 2008: 

Trisha Gupta finds Mohan Maharishi travelling in time. Again.



Mohan Maharishi has never been to Istanbul. But he visits it all the time, in his mind. This fortnight, when his new production, Main Istanbul Hoon, opens its doors to the public, you can travel some of the way with him. It’s likely to be a complicated journey, moving not just from Delhi to Istanbul, but looping and whorling backwards in time, first to the mid-twentieth century and then the sixteenth. Maharishi hopes to conjure up something of the splendour and melancholy of another grand old city for Delhi’s audiences. “I’m interested in the resonances between Delhi and Istanbul. When I read histories of Ottoman Istanbul, I am reminded of Ghalib trudging knee-deep in blood, from Delhi to some place of sanctuary, in 1857,” he told us. “Both places have the same kind of division between Old City and New. In Delhi, there is also the third, which I sometimes call the ‘Ugly Delhi’, ever-spreading…”

Drawing on works by the celebrated Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, Main Istanbul Hoon has as its central character a crotchety, cynical old man called Resat Ekrem Kocu, a popular historian of Istanbul who spent much of his life writing historical columns for newspapers. Kocu appears in Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City, a somewhat eccentric figure, forever torn between his fascination with “the oddities, the weirdness of life in the margins” and his admiration for grand Western classificatory systems. The product of this conflict was his greatest labour of love: an anarchic encyclopaedia devoted to Istanbul, on which he spent 20 years, only to finally abandon it 11 volumes later, having reached the letter G.

Maharishi takes this fascinating – and all-too-real – character, and builds around him a theatrical web of fantasy. Gathering material for the 12th volume of his encyclopaedia, Maharishi’s Kocu travels to the sixteenth century, where a complicated love story is playing itself out (with more than a nod towards My Name is Red). A talented painter falls in love with his first cousin. Unable to deal with the wrath of her father, his uncle Usman, the painter leaves the city. Returning from his travels after 12 years, he is shocked by how much Istanbul has changed. “There is so much more traffic, noise, people…” Maharishi smiles at how this sixteenth-century reference is an indicator of our own times.

The creator of Einstein and Vidyottama discovered a long time ago that the stage offers unlimited creative possibilities if you want to play with time. “The old unities of time, place and character are not necessary. If you move convincingly between centuries, the audience will move with you,” he said. He reminisced about Einstein, possibly his best-remembered play, in which three Einsteins meet – the school-going child, the youthful one and the old professor in Princeton, very famous but marginalised. “No one questioned it,” Maharishi said. “The audience enjoyed the sensation. The young Einstein is excited. He’s going to propose to Mileva today; he’s full of her. The old one turns and says, ‘Mileva died today’. There is drama in this, drama created by time.”

Created for the National School of Drama’s golden jubilee celebrations and performed by the NSD’s highly competent repertory, Main Istanbul Hoon is simultaneously a love story set in sixteenth-century Istanbul and a paean to the city that lives on. It is also a tribute to Orhan Pamuk. “Pamuk writes about how, when he abandoned an architectural career, his mother was very angry. There’s a scene in my play, when his mother says, ‘You probably think you’re somewhere in Europe, where you say the word Picasso and the water freezes. But this is not Europe. This is Turkey, and who cares about art here?’” There are resonances here too. Maharishi can only hope that Delhi audiences will recognise them.

Time Out Delhi, Vol 2 Issue 15 (Oct 17 - Oct 30, 2008)

Theatre Review: Uttararamacharita

Hindi/ Urdu, National School of Drama, June 3 & 4

In the Uttarakhanda (believed to be a later addition to the Valmiki Ramayana), Rama learns from his guptachar (spy) – the aptly-named Durmukha – that his subjects are scathingly critical of his acceptance of Sita after nearly a year in captivity. Rama decides to abandon his pregnant wife in the forest, and a heroic romance is transformed into tragedy.

Over the centuries, many attempts have been made to rework the text, to somehow bring Rama and Sita together. Bhavabhuti’s eighth century Uttararamacharita is foremost among these literary interpretations of the Uttarakhanda. This classic Sanskrit play in seven acts has been translated into Hindi by Satyanarayan Kaviratna, and condensed into a three-act production by veteran playwright-director Prasanna and the members of the National School of Drama’s Repertory Company. 

The play can be said to have two parallel tracks – the first, the main romantic-tragic events that unfold in the lives of Rama and Sita, and the other a comedy track involving side characters or “common people” who comment on, deliver news of, and in one instance, even re-enact the events of the primary track. The actors in comic roles all have brilliant timing. The tragic sequences involving a rather camp Rama and a (deliberately?) melodramatic Sita are less impressive, perhaps because the contemporary tone and tempo of dialogue delivery doesn’t seem of a piece with the rather formal, poetic, alliterative language being used. Both end up seeming a trifle contrived. It’s in the musical and comic interludes and the recitation-like speeches of the guptachars that the language seems to come into its own. Perfectly choreographed by Vimla Shimladka and backed by Govind Pandey’s superlative music score (drawing on Mohan Upreti’s original compositions), these sequences provide a marvelously energetic dramatic experience.

Like all NSD Repertory productions, a great deal of attention has been paid to stage design and costumes, and it shows – though the more traditional-looking white sari-clad Sita and partly bare-chested Rama of the later sequences were infinitely preferable to the Harlequin-like clothes they wore in the first act. Another highlight of the production is the lighting design (by Parag Sarmah) and the innovative use of moving silhouettes on a large screen to create mood and additional dramatic effects with minimal ingredients.


Published in Time Out Delhi, 2008.

Time warp: Banabhatta ki Atmakatha

MK Raina’s fascinating play asks questions of history and context, and of its audience as well.

MK Raina may not have directed a play at the National School of Drama for the last 12 years, but his association with the NSD goes back a long way – he graduated from the School in 1970 and taught there briefly in 1976-77. Among Raina’s students at the time was Amitabh Srivastava. That’s the other long-standing connection that’s made the current production possible – Srivastava, now an established theatre actor and translator, has adapted the novel Banabhatta ki Atmakatha, timed to coincide with the birth centenary year of its author Hazari Prasad Dwivedi (1907-79).

“The first time MK and I worked together was in 1985-86, when I adapted Jagdish Chandar’s novel Kabhi Na Chhode Khet,” remembered Srivastava. Since then, there have been several collaborations, including a play about the Hindi poet Subhadra Kumari Chauhan in 2004. “It was staged in Allahabad, and in other towns where she lived. We had one show in Delhi too – but how many people in Delhi are interested in the lives of Hindi poets?” asked Srivastava.

The question is not merely rhetorical, but it doesn’t seem to have prevented Srivastava and Raina from taking on the challenge of staging Dwivedi’s highly poetic masterwork, which also purports to be the autobiography of the classical Sanskrit poet Banabhatta. Interpreting Banabhatta ki Atmakatha for a contemporary audience is no easy task, for the text demands not one but two leaps in time. First, it has to be approached as a text pre-occupied with the task of nation-building – Dwivedi wrote it in 1946, very much in the context of approaching independence. And second, it has to be read as a historico-philosophical take on the socio-religious tussles that characterised North Indian society in the seventh century AD, when the historical Banabhatta lived.

Banabhatta was the court poet of King Harshavardhana, who rose to power in North India after the decline of the Gupta Empire, ruling from Kannauj and Thanesar (now a small town in Haryana). In fact, Banabhatta’s lyrical-but-florid Sanskrit biography of the emperor, Harshacharita, is one of the primary historical sources for the period. And Banabhatta’s Kadambari, credited with being one of the first novels ever written, is so iconic of novel-ness that, Srivastava says, “Maharashtra mein novel ko upanyas nahi, kadambari ke naam se jaana jaata hai.”

Banabhatta, however, wrote no autobiography. Dwivedi’s novel is an entirely fictional account of a few months in his life. We do know that the poet’s parents died early, and that he left home when he was fairly young. It took Dwivedi’s leap of imagination, however, to make the young Bana a vagabond. “Dwivedi’s Banabhatta is a tramp. He runs a theatre troupe in Ujjayani, he becomes a fake sadhu and then an astrologer,” said Srivastava.

The play opens with Bana’s arrival in Thanesar, where he runs into Nipunika, a low-born woman who once acted in his troupe and used to be in love with him. Nipunika persuades Bana to help her rescue a princess named Bhattini, who is being held captive by one of the smaller chieftains of the area. Then begins a long journey through the Gangetic plain, punctuated by encounters with religious and political figures: Buddhist monks from a nearby vihara, Brahmins, Vaishnavs, tantriks, aghoris. For Raina, the text has many “anti-Brahminical beliefs” embedded in it. “In one scene, Bana hides something in an aghori Bhairav shrine, and the aghoris catch him. And they tell him, ‘tumhare shastra tumhe paakhand sikhaate hain’. No wonder, when this novel was released, the Brahmins of Banaras were up in arms,” laughed Raina.

And yet the novel is deeply imbued with allegories, many of which emerge from Hindu mythology. “Bhattini is an allegory of Sita, and of the mother goddess. She is kidnapped and unlawfully imprisoned, and when she emerges into the open, it is really as if she has emerged from the belly of the earth,” mused Raina. “And she worships Varaha, Vishnu’s boar avatar, who saved the earth by going down himself.” Varaha is also symbolic of the need to save the nation through sacrifice – as Srivastava put it, “to bring it out of the daldal (quicksand).”

The play promises to be interesting in terms of stage design. “I’m using the classical Sanskrit stage, which is minimal. The stage is divided into two parts, the front portion or Rangshish, and the slightly raised back portion, or Rangpith. And two doors, through which the actors enter and leave. That’s it,” said Raina.

The other striking thing about the play is its strong female characters and their engagement with each other. “The bond between the low-caste Nipunika and the noble-born Bhattini is based on Bhattini’s experience of having been kidnapped,” said Raina. Srivastava elaborated, “At one point, Bhattini says the whole country is searching for the missing daughter of Tuvar Milind because she is a princess. But no one thinks of the fact that all the dasis working in these rajmahals are also someone’s missing daughters.”

Published in Time Out Delhi Issue 9 Friday, July 25, 2008