Are the “good old days” always as great as we remember them? Central to nostalgia is a cognitive bias that blurs all the difficulties and disappointments that may have been part of the original reality. It is, as said often, looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
In his collection of essays The Necropolis Trilogy, the playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar revisits his past, but it is not a rosy recollection. Elkunchwar’s lens moves in and out of his childhood and youth, reflecting on who and how the author was in those days. But it is neither a tell-all autobiography nor a memoir with methodically selected episodes: with a stream-of-consciousness flow, it adds moments as it moves along. The poetic quality of the writing, the picturesque details, the stunning organisation of fact and imagination make these essays haunting.
The Necropolis Trilogy
Copper Coin
Pages: 144
Price: Rs.499
Meanings do not come to you instantly though. Elkunchwar does not arrange his life neatly into blocks to make the experience easy for the reader. Conceived as a monologue with the self, the essays encounter emotions and betrayals through the narrated incidents. It recognises invisible cruelties, changing social structures, and urban chaos but also flows with a seeming lightness of being. Interspersed with the playful and the poetic, the entire work moves through philosophical questions of lightness and weight. In her introduction to the book, theatre director Amal Allana says: “Hauntingly beautiful like the fragment of a melody that persistently replays itself in one’s mind, the Necropolis Trilogy is a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings….”
Dormant language forms
In the very first essay, “Necropolis”, Elkunchwar writes: “It’s natural to want to sound ultramodern, yet even though the language is continuously evolving, its old avatar does not disappear. Speakers of the standard urban Marathi find many words in Jnaneshwari [a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita written by the Marathi saint and poet Sant Dnyaneshwar in 1290 CE] strange and arcane. However, many of those words are still widely used in the rural Marathi of Vidarbha and Marathwada, without the slightest deviation from their original meanings. Even if ancient language forms may seem to have disappeared, that’s not quite the case. Like animals hibernating underground, these language forms lie dormant. Or, like corpses dreaming in graves, they await liberation and when the time comes, they creep up and lend our experience a truly picturesque quality, which is often beyond the reach of new language.”
Cover of The Necropolis Trilogy | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
In this stunning passage, which captures the tone of the collection, Elkunchwar is speaking of language that, like memory, remains dormant only to wake up when it finds the right trigger. This is how he introduces Bhiwa, the man who took care of him as a child.
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“Another gentle gust left my body refreshed and my mind relaxed. I felt as if someone was fanning me as wave upon cool wave of air rushed over me now and then. Who is fanning me with such affection? Look, I can even hear the swish of the fan. And the breeze smells of khus and coolness. It has to be Bhiwa. Only he blew such a breeze over me. But isn’t Bhiwa dead? Why did I never come to terms with that? How can he be here, then? Only after many years did I discover he was dead.”
Memories come alive
Thinking of Bhiwa as he sits in Makli, a vast necropolis near Karachi, he is assailed by a host of related memories. With Bhiwa walks in Surayya the songstress, followed by Meena Kumari, Ophelia, Emily Dickinson, the unknown woman who could sing only in her afterlife, and his sister-in-law Mandakini, with whom he had a strange relationship.
He remembers bumping into Bhiwa one day on his way to school but not stopping to speak to him. Why did he ignore this man who loved him so much once? Meanwhile, Mandakini, as she comes alive in the graveyard, gently prods him to enter the world of emotions: “But what about my eyes...?” Elkunchwar, in this conversation between the real and the dead, says: “My ears turned red with shame, I wanted to crumble into dust and disappear forever into the depths of the underworld below the graves.”
The chat around eyes takes him to the day his mother passed away. He remembers that her eyes remained open, despite efforts to close them. In them he sees what he did not see while she lived. “Why did her eyes look like the eyes of an orphan who has been unjustly punished? What kind of sorrow was it that she could not tell even me? I fell short; maybe I was a bad son.”
In this rich tapestry of real and imagined conversations, Elkunchwar inhabits multiple realities. He effortlessly transcends time and space, talking to memories. As reality, dream, and everyday life collide, they create a new universe: that of the artist.
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Sitting in Makli, he says: “I don’t believe in reincarnation. But the thought of lying asleep after death while dreaming a never-ending dream is simply fantastic. It is very logical. It may seem illogical to us. But won’t the logic of the dead be different too…. It is a region where the intellect cannot reach.... It is absurd to even think of crossing it with these useless, broken oars of the intellect.”
He tells Emily Dickinson: “Whenever I think of Bhiwa, I become a little sentimental.” Emily, gently placing a loving hand on his, says:
Delight becomes pictorial
When viewed through pain—
More fair, because impossible
That any gain.
Both of them remain silent for a long time. “I felt she was telling me the secret of art,” writes Elkunchwar. He asks Emily: “So you mean that everything becomes beautiful when touched by art? Delight becomes more pictorial. But what about pain?”
Emily says: “We decide to make the ugly beautiful. Why should it be? Truth is often ugly. Let it be exactly that.”
The Necropolis Trilogy is a contemplative and complex piece of internal theatre by a living legend. Garcha’s English rendition retains beautifully the poetry of the original. This collection is not to be missed.
Deepa Ganesh teaches at RV University, Bengaluru.
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