The editing, proof listening, and corrections took more time and we delivered it in March. Given the pandemic restrictions, ‘The Advertisement’ went for a studio performance in the second week of November and we recorded ‘Buniyaad’ at the wonderful Rangayan Q around the same time in a three-day schedule.
The rehearsals of the play and the ‘Buniyaad’ adaptation ran parallel to each other. The Millennials had heard of it through their parents and inevitably saw the likes of Haveli Ram and Lajo in a sepia filter. The veterans knew the whole story, remembered the names of the iconic characters, and could match them with the actors who played them on screen. Each and every actor across the polarised islands of Delhi theatre – Mandi House and South Delhi, irrespective of their age, knew ‘Buniyaad’. I started reaching out and one did not need to introduce ‘Buniyaad’ and that said a lot about its lasting legacy. Casting myself as Lajo was easy and economical, 29 still to go. The script had more than 60 characters and we had to bring them down to half due to both artistic and materialist reasons. The Great Indian Family Drama is alright, but Partition? From screen is our new stage to staging a screenplay, we came a full circle rather quickly. Over a video call, it always seems like the easiest thing to do, and we dived headlong into it. We were asked to adapt it to audio and to produce.
But ‘Buniyaad’, written by the fabulous Manohar Shyam Joshi and published by Vani Prakashan, is not a play, it is a soap opera. I had already directed the audio play version of Asghar Wajahat’s modern classic “Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya O Jammyai Nai” for them. It was then that we were approached by the Swedish audiobooks streaming service Storytel to do an audio play adaptation of a vintage Doordarshan soap opera, ‘Buniyaad’. We started masked and sanitized rehearsals for a play to be performed at our Civil Lines studio in Delhi. It was in September that we first thought we could return to some kind of old normal. We are talking about May 2020.įrom there on, things improved slowly or so it seemed back then. At times we did think that we could have done with a more sombre name but that’s not how life and the ‘Silly Souls’ work. “Tafreeh” kept us afloat through the worst days of the first wave. We had to turn the screen, in most cases not more than 5 inches of technology clasped by a human palm, not just into a stage but ideally also into a garden where people could at least move informally if not smell each other and flowers. We invented “Screen is the New Stage” as our new favourite cliche and as the punchline of the second edition of “Tafreeh”, our Garden Theatre Festival. Like all those who could, we also went digital.
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