The city-based part-time author, Avinash Matta, who wrote the 2014 play, Pink Haathi in the Room, recorded a comical stance on the story of a fledgling actor coping with mental health crises. The year after coming to Hyderabad for the first time, he felt like a tourist, craving company, to talk to someone. “Then this random idea about a friendless man popped up in my head. It had the potential to be a good story – to portray someone who is craving a hug, goes out into the big world to get one and sees what happens to him,” he tells us. Avinash’s words were so direct, and chattily circumstantial that sometimes it is tricky to figure out that Jay Jha’s impending theatre production Banerjee Babu is not the writer’s self-reflection or autobiography. “You can say that, to a certain extent, it is one,” Avinash adds.
Hinging on his writing, Jay directs the 45-minute eponymous play in a Hindi original, narrating the quandary of an intellectually disabled man’s encounter with a distressed and infertile Aparna Malhotra. “She is unable to have children and her husband refuses to adopt. Banerjee has never been hugged in his life and Aparna yearns for the love of a child. The two meet and what follows is a loving, heartwarming yet hard-hitting account based on a conversation between two different people who expect the least in life. All they crave is affection, hope and comfort — that heartfelt feeling of receiving love,” Jay lets us in on what the audience can be prepared for. While we wonder why the protagonist does not have a forename, Sreehari Ajith, who plays the character, shares, “He was abandoned as a kid. His mother left a letter with him undersigned with her name in it — Ananda Banerjee. Hence, the people in the church started calling him Banerjee Babu.”
The narrative spotlights endearment, a hug — a symbol of universal connection in humanity. Expect the lived realities surrounding Parkinson’s disease, and Down syndrome exemplified in a 30-year-old man, abandoned in front of a church, excluded from peer groups — someone who has never been given a hug or shown empathy. “This any day is different from other plays. It is special embodying the need for warmth that one might not have felt in a while. It will touch one’s emotional strings not in a sad way, but will surely make them cry,” Jay tells us, adding, “I am not a fan of developing a character through my directorial lens. I think about how an actor will react in real life if the same fictitious situation in the story comes to him. The play addresses how unknowingly we judge people by their actions without knowing why they are doing so. However, when we talk to them and let them express themselves, we tend to understand the reason behind those actions. It is a tale about small gestures in our day-to-day lives making a huge impression on someone and impacting them.”
₹200. May 21. 8 pm. Lamakaan, Banjara Hills.