Sometimes one walks into a small room with the expectation that it is going to be an amateur theatrical production; after all, one should not expect much when the ‘stage’ (at Shilpo Sushama Art Gallery in Madhyamgram) is an inch off the floor and the room cannot accommodate more than twenty. But then the earnestness of the actors and the power of the story blow one away, leaving him or her wondering: why can’t more of mainstream Calcutta theatre be like this?
In Khola Hawa’s Baghuar Pahar, the soldiers (Sumit Kumar Dey and Kalyan Dutta) of two warring nations — India and Pakistan perhaps? — still man their posts on the all-important peak, Baghuar Pahar, and hurl rocks (and expletives) at each other some thirty years after the war began. They haven’t had contact with their motherlands for quite some time and have spent years only playing board games with each other in a mock re-enactment of their national conflict. Both their memories are tinged with common hues of nostalgia and regret at the lost simple pleasures of family life. But the duo’s entire world view comes crashing down when a couple of vagabonds (Jayprakash Sarkar and Ayan Bhowmick) visit their outpost, asking for water and informing the soldiers of a horrifying future that they had not even heard of. In a scene reminiscent of Vladimir and Estragon coming across Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot, the two wandering vagrants paint a picture — simultaneously to the audience and to the soldiers — about the utter meaninglessness of life in a post-war hellscape.
Baghuar Pahar needed only four actors, and each actor played his part to perfection. Although sometimes descending into preachy didacticism, the dialogues (written by the director, Sumit Kumar Dey) were witty and executed with conviction. The parallel reminiscing of their bygone lives, the shared bickering over loud displays of patriotism and the final recognition that, after years spent at each other’s throats, they have nothing left but each other, along with a vividly potent lighting display conducted by Bishwajit Dey — all contributed to craft a tale with its heart firmly in the right place.
