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Outstanding perceptions of truth

Barff, a play written and directed by noted actor Saurabh Shukla who also plays one of the three protagonists in…

Outstanding perceptions of truth

(Photo: Twitter)

Barff, a play written and directed by noted actor Saurabh Shukla who also plays one of the three protagonists in it, claims to be a psychological thriller. A psychological thriller, by its very definition, suggests the psychological motivations and emotional relationships or characters affected by a crime.

But there is no crime in this play. In fact, the “thriller” element, imaginatively structured into the script, is used as a clever strategy to bring forth how the perceptions of “truth” can diametrically vary among people, never mind the stark differences in their educational, social, cultural and even emotional status.

Staged at Birla Mandir in Kolkata, the play is set over one single day in winter against the backdrop of an abandoned village in the Kashmir Valley.

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One can actually see snow falling in the backdrop, minimising the humans in the foreground. Siddhant Kaul (Saurabh Shukla), a Kolkata-based doctor who has come to Srinagar for the first time to attend a medical conference, is persuaded by Ghulam Rasool (Sunil Palwal), a cabbie who is driving him around, to come and take a look at Jigara, their threeyear-old little one who seems to be suffering from some serious ailment. What is the ailment? Why is the baby’s mother Nafeesa (Sadia Siddiqui) so obsessed with her little one?

These questions are undercut by the double-edged suspicion the doctor begins to harbour about the true intentions of the couple, who suddenly hold him captive until he finds a definite, medical solution to little Jigara's sickness. The first half is soaked in the nail-biting suspense of what will happen next.

In the second half, the mood, spirit and agenda change though it still revolves around the “sick” baby and her desperate parents.

The narrative builds up to a different kind of suspense through heated arguments between the fiery and aggressive Nafeesa and the completely confused doctor — one, an uneducated, lonely village wife in Kashmir clinging on to her sick child and the other, a city-bred, highly educated and modern doctor (also Kashmiri by birth), willing to take a look at the child yet convinced about her not being curable.

Ghulam, who loves his wife deeply and empathises with her trauma, tries to make peace with both the doctor and her, though his sympathies and understanding are entirely aligned to his wife. Small nuggets of a different perspective on life emerge through the play. Ghulam and his wife are the sole inhabitants of the village, the rest having gone away after a bomb attack some years ago. “Why did you not leave with the others?” the doctor asks him.

“Would you leave your father alone in his old age and go away? This home has nurtured me since I was a baby. I am no coward like the others who left,” says Ghulam.

He even switches on the lights in the empty houses so that they are not uncared for. The single-set Barff plays out against a bluetinted mountain in the backdrop of Ghulam and Nafeesa's modest home, the lighting vacillating between different degrees of darkness, thereby adding to the mystique and the mystery.

The minimalistic set design is imaginative, with a street lamp standing on a base on one side, the centre leading up to Ghulam’s modest home divided into a sitting room and the bedroom where the sick baby lies and the kitchen shown through shadow play. The dialogue is magical, taut and satirical that reflects alternate perspectives on raw reality, with touches of humour thrown in when the doctor is forced to break into old Hindi film songs by Nafeesa.

But it is the acting that runs away with the show. One simply cannot prioritise and rank the actors because they are all incredibly brilliant. Sadia even picks up a smattering of the local Kashmiri lingo. Sunil, originally from Kashmir, is a natural. “What is Truth, doctor?” asks Ghulam Rasool angrily when he suggests that Nafeesa needs psychiatric treatment.

“Does anyone tell the crazily devoted worshippers who offer prayers to a stone smeared with vermillion believing it to be God to see a psychiatrist? Then why do you accuse my wife of being a mental patient?” The doctor has no answer. He tells them that his wife died of cancer in the terminal stage, lamenting the foolishness of people who refuse to accept the truth even when it stares them in the face.

But Ghulam and Nafeesa believe that truth is based on one's faith and does not exist in a vacuum.

After an electrifying climax that shocks both the doctor and audience alike, we are forced to accept, like the doctor does, that in certain ways, Ghulam and Nafeesa are right when they say that even death and life are truths created out of and based on trust.

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