You can't live with them. You can't live without them. You don't choose them, certainly. That is how it is with families and siblings, mostly. Fraught with emotions, these are never easy relationships. Under most circumstances, it is difficult to shake off the sense of kinship, which makes things only harder. Often, the moral obligation outweighs everything else. Perhaps that is why families are always a great source of drama, clichés even. Pradeep Vaiddya's KAJWVYANCHA GAAV takes the obvious and manoeuvres the premise to present a sensitive and intimate portrait of the Dixit family in a village in the Konkan.
90th birthday celebrations have been planned for the mother/grandmother Kalindi Dixit - "Aaji"(Radhika Hangekar) who is the surviving matriarch of the household. Not a few minutes have passed and the discord is apparent. The elder son addressed as "Aappa" (Ashish Vaze) is riled up. It is soon enough clear that all is not well between him, his younger brother known in the family as "Bhau" (Nikhil Mujumdar), and their youngest, unmarried sister Shanta (Sayali Sahasrabuddhe) who teaches in the village school. The planners of the birthday celebrations are the two older sisters, "Taai" - the eldest (Rupali Bhave) from Pune, and Pratibha (Madhurani Prabhulkar), the middle daughter who lives in the USA. "Taai's" daughter Shweta (Sanyogita Pendse), the eldest of the children in the household is also visiting from Pune with her friend Chinmay (Sourabh Mulay). The household is run by Bhau's wife Vasudha (Priya Nerlekar), a docile woman with not much of a say. Bhau and Vasudha have two school-going daughters Meena (Mayuri Chaudhari) and Deepa (Mukta Soman). Appa's son Ganesh (Gandhar Salvekar), older to the girls, is prone to epileptic seizures.
The first half of the play more or less sets the ground for these inter-familial relationships. It is in the second half that the unravelling of these relationships takes place. The two visiting sisters find themselves confronting the tensions between their other three sibilings, and in some part find themselves rooted in their surroundings and removed at the same time. The siblings open up with each other and the bottled up doubts and bitterness find outlet and expression.
The children similarly find themselves encountering experiences and questions that have perhaps left them a little older. Aaji was the glue binding the Dixit family but now she is no more. The separate conversations between Taai and Bhau; between Taai and Aapa; between Pratibha and Shanta; between Pratibha and the curious little girls Meena and Deepa; between Shweta and Chinmay; between Shweta and Aaji - it is these conversations that form the bedrock of this family drama. This isn't about resolution or even reconciliation. These conversations are like little windows of reflection - opportunities to understand ourselves as we attempt to understand our families. The feeling of support and solidarity persists in spite of everything.
There are outsiders to the family - the priest & teak trader (Sameer Joshi) and Gadkari (Shanta's colleague in the school and her clandestine lover) who find themselves involved, but are peripheral to the drama within. All the actors do a commendable job. The stage design is redolent of the Konkan with its simple yet symbolic references, while the action takes place in the centre along a long axis, with the audience on either side. Pradeep Vaiddya has always been a sensitive light and stage designer. As writer-director, he has delicately vocalised the undercurrents of familial relationships. Overtones of Elkunchwar's "Wada", and the throwback to writers like Margaret Atwood whose quilting metaphor is pronounced in the play, seem to have been influencing factors. Yet the play can claim its independent space in the interstices of the family it represents, and in the process makes our families a little more familiar.
*Deepa Punjani has been writing on theatre and performance for close to two decades. She represents the Indian National Section of Theatre Critics, which is part of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) that has over 50 participating countries.
