Fiction: Delphi tries to find her footing in theatre while also navigating realities of her youth

I finally had a dream I could remember.

V and I were in Goa. I had been to Goa before, but only with Asha. The trips were short, to meet my aunt Mensa. They didn’t count as the rites-of-passage trips young people took with friends. I had a good idea from friends’ photographs about what those could be like. Plus, shacks – what a concept.

V and I were on the beach. He was wearing black undies. I had a lilac bikini on and the waves were hitting us at high speed, almost painfully. Asha would have preferred I wore a one-piece swimsuit with shorts. Laila and Dhananjay were somewhere at the back in a shack, drinking beer and having some drama. And out of the sea came Asha. I froze. How did she find us? Slick, shimmering, she was, a python coiled around her neck. Or was it an octopus? I couldn’t tell. It was a slimy creature and it changed colours like one of those mood rings that got popular in school in the 90s. When she was close to us, she looked livid. Her flaming-Asha face – a rare, frightening sight – heightened in terror by the coiled creature around her neck. I wanted to explain what I was doing here, but I couldn’t open my mouth. A part of me knew I was dreaming, but my eyelids were glued to the lower line of my eye with Fevi kwick. I’d had this feeling of paralysis in my dreams before.

It was inconclusive, as dreams generally were. But it didn’t take rocket science to know where it came from.

Things between Asha and me had been strained for the last few weeks. She wasn’t thrilled about me doing this workshop in the first place and agreed to pay for its rather pricy fee, as long as I kept my internship at The Daily Deccan, the most respectable paper in the city, and did my Master’s in “something-sensible” right after that.

Asha was, for all practical purposes, my mother. She was the woman I lived with, ate with, watched TV with, and necessarily spent Sundays with (apart from the duration of the workshop). She had given up on me coming to church for Sunday morning mass and told me about it often in the hope that I’d be lured. She wore crisp cotton sarees through the week and went to the bank. On the weekends, she wore precisely ironed shirts and trousers and inspected our crumbling little Cooke Town house.

34/7 was a marvel, in that it stood at all. If someone said, “Nothing is permanent but change,” they were saying it about 34/7. When we fixed the pipes, the ceiling fan would wobble. When the electrician came by to fix the wobble, there would be water seepage in the walls as he left. On maintenance Sunday, Asha would fix some things herself, while I stood, neck-craned, handing her tools in uncomfortable positions. This was mostly after lunch, when everyone preferred to nap. Then we would tend to the garden, get rid of weeds, repot everything all the time, pluck coriander, mint, curry leaves from the plants, wash and dry them on our old-ass checked towels, and box them wrapped inside precious paper napkins. We’d break for chai, then get Asha’s starched cotton sarees from the clothes stand, and fold, iron, and do what she called “General Upkeep”. If I was lucky, I could slip out in the evenings to meet my best friend Su or maybe watch a play.

34/7 is where we’d lived since the day Asha brought me home at two, from the orphanage and adoption agency that Mensa ran. Little Lamps, in Goa. Hence the trips. My room had stayed the same for the subsequent two decades. Asha covered everything with lacy or crocheted pieces of cloth. My room had one on the stereo, one on the PC, and also one on any book I was reading as though it was better shut.

She’d wanted me to do my master’s immediately after my bachelor’s in journalism. I had managed to convince her of the importance of “finding my passion”, an idea completely unknown to her, though she’d agreed at the end. Now I could see that she was starting to suspect my intentions and finding flaws in my passion-plan. I’d come home late, sometimes drunk and hiding it (which was worse than being just drunk), irritated or even crying, and some days ecstatic. The night Raheem dropped me off was just too late for her to excuse. We didn’t speak for days. I couldn’t quite explain to her that in another world the moral edge was taken off things like drinking, smoking joints, and coming home late. Having a good time didn’t make you a bad person. And art, gosh, art. Asha, dude, what a tremendous thing to ponder the human predicament. Questions about why Antigone was wrong or right, or how one’s words could travel with impact in space, or like, how to find the ephemeral truth of a fleeting moment – these, in my opinion, were worthy pursuits. And conversations about these were sacred cornerstones of the post-rehearsal world. The hours of talking, arguing, bonding – they were essential. If I’d rush home from rehearsal, I’d miss all of that and spend time in an ordinariness that had begun to irk me.

But to Asha, I’d say I was doing my lines at Su’s, or spending quality time with her, now that we didn’t study together. Su had moved to Dubai a month ago, and I hadn’t told Asha. I hoped Su’s mum didn’t drop by randomly as she had once with Diwali sweets which Asha had accepted with a polite smile saying, thanks but Christmas is of more significance to us. Asha didn’t know about V either. How it would be if she did, I really don’t know, and I wasn’t ready to find out.

As the shows of Antigone got closer, I was quite tense, and Asha sensed it. I ate less, smoked more, and the bananas that Asha stuffed in my bag would sometimes get smashed from being in there too long. I didn’t love bananas and she didn’t care. That bugged me. And also, the same conversation with Asha.

– When is your show, Delphi?

– End of this month, I told you. Will you come?

– Where will it be?

– At the Centre for Performance itself. But on the bigger stage, not where we are rehearsing.

– How much are the tickets?

– 300-500.

– Even for the parents?

– I will get you a free ticket, Asha.

– I can pay if needed, not a problem. What is the name of your director?

– Laila Saldana.

Each time, Asha would Google Laila Saldana on our desktop in my room and read everything she could about her. I knew because of my search history.

Meanwhile, at rehearsal, chaos ensued. We still hadn’t blocked the argument scene between Antigone and Creon fully – the meat of the play. V had run the wheelchair over my foot a few times and apologised in a vague, uninterested manner. Naina, who played Ismene, often rushed out of rehearsal saying Sorry gaiz my driver’s downstairs, leaving us to pick up her props. She also had bad breath or like, a cavity that needed dental attention and I didn’t know how to tell her. Sonya, the costume-designer, who’d worked with Laila for a long time, hadn’t yet shown up with our clothes. Laila raised her voice at Jagga and Raja because they were chilling too much. It was a little bit funny, because I’d never seen Jagga embarrassed. He was too efficient to be told he was taking it easy. I could see he’d curbed the impulse to say something back to Laila. She’d begun yelling at different people at different intensities, and I was worried if it would be me next. Maybe this anxiety translated as Antigone looking steelier and Laila liked that. Only I knew I was biting my cheeks and chewing on the flakes of flesh that fell out as a result.

Excerpted with permission from Good Arguments, Deepika Arwind, Simon and Schuster India.