Voicing out his incredible love story

Play on

Our Theatre presented a Hindi play Naariyal Paani at the Ranga Shankara recently. Written and directed by Sandeep Shikhar, the play revolved around an un-named protagonist (played by Vivek Vijayakumaran), who has been wanting to tell his love story to people many times. But every time he starts narrating it, he is interrupted in some way.

So hiring Ranga Shankara as a platform, he speaks out his love story to the general public.

The protagonist, who likes to play football, jokes about the fact that he has no name, at the beginning of the play. “If I tell you my name, I will have to ask you for your name as well. That will take a lot of time and my story will remain incomplete,” he says.

 As his story goes, one day he was returning home after practice, when he saw a girl having coconut water (naariyal paani) at a fruit shop. He saw her for the next two days.
However, on the third day, when he didn’t see her, he asked the fruit-seller for her, for which the fruit-seller says, “Who? Naariyal paani wali?” For this, the protagonist responds in anger, “Why do you call her naariyal paani wali? Does she sell naariyal paani?”

An interesting feature of the play was its music. Two instrumentalists — a tabla player (Santosh Satavailli) and a guitarist (Anupam Roy), formed the supporting cast.

While the tabla player signified the physical presence of the character, the guitar player represented the rest of the universe. There were five songs, composed by Sandeep, and performed by Anupam live on stage.

Said Sandeep, the director of the play, “I have been into theatre since 1993, and this play was based on personal experience. The character is inspired from a boy in my neighbourhood.” As he spoke about his days in his native town of Dhanbad, he got nostalgic.

“The people over there hardly drink tender coconut water. Most people would have probably had it two or three times in their entire lifetime.” Speaking of Bangalore and its theatre-loving audience, Sandeep said, “Bangalore has one of the best audiences ever. It’s sensible and knows how to react.”