Ode to an era

Book review of Enter Stage Right: The Alkazi / Padamsee Family Memoir

The memoir presupposes an expedition into the past to collect scraps of material for a narrative worthy of all those who inhabit it. The author of the memoir is often an archivist, a historian whose resources are imbued with nostalgia, a builder of shrines for those who have gone, to preserve them in a forgetful age. 

Feisal Alkazi is each of these in Enter Stage Right: The Alkazi / Padamsee Family Memoir published in January this year. At the very outset, he provides an image both quaint and enduring — his grandmother Kulsumbai’s horseshoe-shaped dining table in the Padamsee residence on the fourth floor of “Kulsum Terrace”, in Bombay. It is here, in 1943, that a group of young actors are gathered around his uncle Sultan “Bobby” Padamsee, who founded the epochal Theatre Group in 1941. It is here that his father, 18-year-old Ebrahim Alkazi meets his mother, Roshen Padamsee, whose schooling in England has been interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. 

The Alkazi-Padamsee alliance becomes a magnetic field that draws actors and artists, whose work will soon amplify the predicaments of a newly-independent country. Enter Stage Right pulsates with the lives and careers of those who shape, and in turn, are shaped by a love of theatre, in particular Ebrahim and Roshen Alkazi, Alyque and Pearl Padamsee. Built into the narrative is a bildungsroman of sorts — Feisal recalls a childhood spent playacting in the drawing rooms of friends; he offers a giddy snapshot of a group of teenagers walking down a railway track, singing Mera Naam Hai Shabnam. 

His parents Ebrahim and Roshen are married in 1946; one gleans that his sister Amal is born during a dress rehearsal of a production of Hamlet,  in August 1947. Ebrahim leaves to study in England later that month, together with Nissim Ezekiel, not yet the famed poet of “Night of the Scorpion”. His wife Roshen joins him there, as do other friends, Goan artist Francis Newton Souza and his wife Maria. Feisal’s narrative throws open a window for a view of London, dingy and grey, stupefied by the war. He offers a snippet of Ebrahim’s observations: “Souza, Nissim and I would debate long over whether we should have tomato soup or pea soup (which was a halfpenny cheaper) at the Lyons Corner House when we ventured out to treat ourselves. At the butcher’s we would content ourselves, once a week, with leftover slivers of meat and with broken biscuits at the baker’s, because that was all we could afford.’”

Enter Stage Right: The Alkazi / Padamsee Family Memoir

Author:  Feisal Alkazi

Publisher:  Speaking Tiger

Pages: 256 (hardcover); Price: Rs 699

The cities of Enter Stage Right, and in particular Bombay and Delhi, are protagonists with fissured histories that seek to reconcile a colonial past with a new nationalism. Feisal delineates their cultural exuberance and uncertainties, even as he pays close attention to his family’s artistic evolution within them. Bombay, to which Ebrahim and Roshen return after three-and-a-half years in London, is the cosmopolitan hub of artists and musicians. It is the city of The Progressive Artists Group, home to Walter Langhammer, art director of The Times of India,  and Rudolf von Leyden, its art critic. It is the city of jazz. To this Bombay Ebrahim brings European drama in translation, most notably Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, Luigi Pirandello’s  Six Characters in Search of an Author,  and the plays of Jean Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco.  

In Delhi, where Ebrahim moves to head the National School of Drama (NSD) from 1962 to 1977, Feisal’s narrative is slower, more introspective, less sure of itself. His parents have separated; Roshen relocates from Bombay to a flat in Delhi’s Defence Colony with Amal and him, while Ebrahim stays in Nizamuddin with his companion, Uma Anand. It is here that eight-year-old Feisal learns to sit cross-legged on durries during prayers at Modern School, instead of standing and singing the Lord’s Prayer at his school in Bombay. He begins to notice the city’s monuments: “Layers of the seven cities of Delhi would be suddenly seen through a doorway: a dome, a minaret, glimpsed through the trees.” These monuments later inspire Ebrahim to set up the Purana Qila Theatre for productions like Girish Karnad’s  Tughlaq in 1972 and Balwant Gargi’s  Sultan Razia  in 1974.

Roshen, who had in the past designed the costumes for nearly all of Ebrahim’s Bombay productions, continues to work with him at the NSD, despite their estrangement.  Enter Stage Right  then, is also about an abiding loneliness. While it holds forth on contemporary theatre and art, it also tells of the fortunes of a family — its tragedies and ruptures, its breaking away only to come together, over and over again. Feisal’s narrative voice is sympathetic but steady when he tells of Bobby’s suicide in 1946, at the age of 23. He mentions his parents’ separation as a “sudden” revelation to him, a boy of eight, allowing its darkness to seep in only through one of Roshen’s poems, “The Weight of Loneliness.” Towards the end he observes that with his father’s death in August 2020, the last of those who once congregated at the horseshoe-shaped dining table had faded away. An era ends; Enter Stage Right is its elegant, if somewhat melancholic, memorial.