Hatred divides nations and families
Letters to My Grandma, by Anusree Roy, is the first play of what Teesri Duniya artistic director Rahul Varma is now calling his “charter season.”
As politicians bicker over a divisive proposed Charter of Quebec Values that would impose a dress code on people in the public service, Varma just happens to be presenting a play that reminds us of a dark long ago, when Hindu and Muslim neighbours were pitted against each other in India.
In Letters to My Grandma, the Toronto-based Roy, one of Canada’s most prominent South Asian playwrights, takes us back in time into the land of her grandmother’s memories, when the 1947 partition of India wreaked havoc and bloodshed.
Roy’s previous works include her first solo, Pyaasa (about India’s caste system), which won her two 2007 Dora Awards for both writing and acting. She followed that up with Letters to My Grandma, which was nominated for the same awards in 2009. She then created the duo, Roshni, about two street children, in 2010. Her first multi-character play, Brothel #9, about the Kolkata sex trade, created a sensation the next year.
Roy has also written several operatic librettos (The Golden Boy, Noor over Afghan and Phoolan Devi, due to première in New York next year).
At the Montreal opening of Letters to My Grandma, the playwright ended up sitting next to this reviewer, who had actually hoped to see her on stage. Roy confided that she was very excited because this was the first time she had seen anyone else perform her one-woman show. For the Montreal run, the author role has been taken over by recent National Theatre School Graduate Sehar Ali Bhojani.
Letters to My Grandma is storytelling theatre in which a young Hindu woman about to be married to a Muslim man in Canada yearns for the blessing of her grandmother in faraway India. As the bride-to-be named Malobee shares her familial journey into the past, she takes on multiple roles including that of her mother, her grandmother and her grandmother’s nurse.
The grandmother, of course, is the most interesting, because she survived India’s partition as a young mother. The struggle left her deeply scarred — and bitterly intolerant. Even the nurse who gives the old woman her bath gets called a “dirty Muslim.”
The most gripping scene takes place in 1947 when Grandma, fleeing from the battles, babe in arms, uses devious means to board a Muslim bus heading for the seaport. She successfully persuades the driver to throw another (truly Muslim) woman off the bus, so that she and her child may board. It’s a ruthless moment that haunts over the years. And, in a final, rather incredible, plot twist, grandma is forced to fully face up to the central crime of her past.
Bhojani is a dynamic, skilled performer who has benefited from the experienced direction of Lib Spry in this simply but evocatively presented piece. As she moves back and forth between characters on the sparely furnished stage with a backdrop of Indian textiles hanging from the ceiling, she gradually draws us into a modern woman’s perspective of the past on another continent and what it means to her in the here and now.