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Back to her roots through Basheer

Aparna Gopinath on how close to her heart the author is and the play based on his stories.

It was the first story she heard Paul Mathew read out for a little group of theatre artistes somewhere in Chennai. She was there too, back then not the film actor we know today from ABCD or Munnariyippu. Just a girl falling in love with that simple language that had endeared Vaikom Muhammed Basheer to generations of Malayalis. Aparna Gopinath heard Paul, her co-actor, read out Premalekhanam and then Mucheetu Kalikkarante Makal. Director Rajiv Krishnan was weaving a play out of these two stories. It was called Moonshine and Skytoffee. Four years later, Aparna went on stage at the Kozhikode Town Hall and became Saramma — Basheer’s Saramma from Premalekhanam.

On the front row sat Fabi, his wife, remembering Basheer, and the many times she had read that story. When Aparna met her after the show, Fabi hugged her and told her: “Whenever I read the story, I only heard Saramma, now I got to see her.” Aparna melted.

Now when she is coming back to Kerala — to Kochi this time — with another Basheer play, she has a heart full of memories, collected over the last 12 years.

“It was in 2004 that Paul read us those stories and we had Moonshine and Skytoffee. After that we realised there were so many more stories that needed to be brought on stage. So there came Oru Manushyan, Poovan Pazham, and others,” Aparna says. Rajiv also added Neela Velicham, Mathilukal, Shabdangal and Vishwavikhyatamaya Mookku. “The second time around, we did a lot more research. We went to Kozhikode as a group, talked to people and tried to make it as local as Beypore — where Basheer lived with his family. From the youngest little girl we met to the oldest man sitting on the Kozhikode beach, everyone had something to say about Basheer.”

Still from  Under the Mangosteen Tree.Still from Under the Mangosteen Tree.

That was also the time they visited Basheer’s house and Aparna met Fabi and spent hours talking and laughing with her. “She is everything you could imagine Basheer had in his life, everything he wrote about, and everything around him,” Aparna says.

They first called the play Sangathi Arinja — a phrase that had come out of a lot of Basheer characters. Then they named it Under the Mangosteen Tree. “There was one in his house, under which he sat and listened to people telling their stories.”

Aparna was too young to have seen the man himself before he passed away but as an actor, she believes she visits him in every single word he has written. “He portrays people as they are. Unfortunately I can’t read Malayalam. But we have tried to make it in English, as simple as possible, to not lose the essence. We feel the characters, their simplicity. I am lost for words but he is a real celebration.”

She should know for the Kochi show would be their 59th performance of the play. It has gone to places, more outside Kerala than within. And everywhere people understood, they connected. Aparna’s favourite of all, however, continues to be that first one she heard — Premalekhanam.

But let’s go back to that number 59. If she has been travelling so much with the play, how could she act in so many movies — the last one was School Bus, as the mother of two kids, wife of Jayasurya. “I manage my time. When I do one, I don’t do the other,” she says simply.

But she cannot pick one form over the other. There is no theatre-first or movies-first rule. “I am an actor. I am glad I have the luxury of choosing which medium I would like to go to. But I have a lot of respect for my work and I will honour whichever I have to honour at the time."

Right now, there is no news on the movie front. There is one coming up but she is not at liberty to talk about it yet. And hopefully she may soon be quite comfortable with Malayalam to dub for herself. Having grown up in Chennai, she is happy to have got in touch with her mother tongue again through the few movies she did. And from the way she keeps alive the stories of one of Malayalam’s greatest writers, Aparna is as closest to her motherland as she could ever be.

Under the Mangosteen Tree will be staged at JT PAC on Sunday, 7 pm.

( Source : Deccan Chronicle. )
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