For the first several minutes, the solo play My Dear Arvind comes across as a love story — the love of Suman for her late husband Arvind. She is wheelchair-bound; he is the dear departed. What direction can her life take now? Suman herself gives a hint of that. Singapore Indian playwright Tanuj Khosla gives his heroine a very lively voice, almost flirtatious, and not that of a grieving widow.
The remarkable thing about the play is how well Khosla, a male playwright, has captured a woman’s hopes and expectations and disappointments normally associated with a female hand penning the words. Asked about this and his points of reference, he tells Connected to India, “Most writers, at their very core, are failed actors or actors who had the desire but not the talent or opportunity to portray various characters. I am no different and live my ‘acting’ dream via writing, where I create characters, both male and female, give them lives, problems, pains, emotions and then just express what they would do or feel, through my words.”
“At the end of the day,” he adds, “both writers and actors bring out the character — the only difference is that the writer writes the words and the actor mouths and emotes them. This play was 100 per cent born from my imagination, but I tried to keep Suman’s character as real and relatable as possible. It was my challenge to myself to write in a woman’s voice.”
The play begins in a room where a photo of Arvind sits on a side table, and then Suman enters the room in her wheelchair, and starts speaking. Addressing the audience directly, she says in Hindi, “Thodi jalan ho rahi hai mujhe, aaj aap sab logon ke beech mein baithe itne saare couples ko dekh kar (I feel a little jealous, looking at all the couples sitting here among all of you).”
Suman opens the scene with a couple of jokes, asking audience members to focus on her and forget about all the chores, all the kids at home. The play then moves into her time with Arvind, their romance and their marriage.
The turning point in the relationship was the day a motorcycle crushed her spine, as she fell on the road, trying to save Arvind from an accident. The narration captures Suman’s loneliness even in her happy marriage with a loving husband — before and after the crippling accident.
The sting in the tail, the twist in the tale comes at the very end, in about four minutes or less, turning My Dear Arvind from a love story to a revenge thriller.
“To be frank, the end was the first thing I decided on!” says Khosla, asked about how this scene came to him. “I wanted to give the audience this shock effect as a payoff for sitting through 30 minutes of the play. Once all the details of the climax were clear in my head, I started writing the play backwards.”
Always a solo act, the original Hindi play has been staged in Toronto, Washington DC, and Dubai, while an English version of My Dear Arvind has been staged in Singapore.
“The feedback has been quite positive,” he says about the audience reaction to this play. “Many women could relate to the first 75 per cent of the play and everybody felt the shock effect from the twist at the end.”
Khosla, who works in the investment sector in Singapore, has written plays before, including one in what is known as “Hinglish” — dialogues that combine Hindi and English, and resonate with young urban Indians. In a previous interview, Connected to India has covered his March 2019 Hinglish play titled Family + Admission Planning, which marked his stage debut in New Delhi.
As with My Dear Arvind, which has a story that any woman in any country can identify with, there is a universal element also in Family + Admission Planning, which is centred around the Indian obsession with admission and results.
In this previous interview, Khosla says, “While this play is set in Delhi, I think it can be adapted for most Asian cities and the audience will identify with the characters.”
Given his preferred language — Hindi — for writing plays, we ask Khosla if this does not somehow limit his audience. “I respectfully disagree,” he says with a smile. “Almost 375 million people in India speak Hindi. If I add the Hindi-speaking population outside India, then that number is well over 400 million. That is sizeable.”
“The play has been very well received by the Hindi-speaking audience wherever and whenever it has been performed,” he tells us. “Having said that, it has also been performed in English in Singapore earlier this year and received great applause.”
