Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry
“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”
— Bertolt Brecht
We are trapped in the middle of a maelstrom, and can slowly feel ourselves being sucked deeper and deeper in the abyss of darkness. The images of people dying — with desperate and helpless family members scurrying for basic requirements — assault our sense of humanity. One feels stretched and shipwrecked with the sinking feeling of many things that one held precious being lost. This makes one turn inwards and search for those spaces within one’s imagination and ferret out something precious, something human. Sometimes I wonder, is all this really happening or are we imagining this apocalypse!
The arts have been a survival tool in these terrible times, for not only the artist, but also for many others. The isolation has made me value the role of art and made it central to my sanity. Constraints in physical movement allowed me, through art, to move in fictional spaces. A favourite book, film, music or poem gave access to exotic spaces, enter other lives, sometimes far removed from ours.
A sense of tomorrow ceased to exist. It’s all in the ‘now’, and the ‘now’ is fragile, tenuous, a puff of wind. Everything looks the same but in that sameness, there is unfamiliarity, alienation, a sense of distance that cannot be fully comprehended or grasped.
Artists have made artworks during this isolation. It is the oxygen that the artist needs to survive, to feel the pulse of his being.
It might be too early to write that book, paint that picture or make that play capturing the anxiety and fear that is being experienced. Individually and collectively, more time is needed to mourn a world that has passed us by, see it dissolve, merge with the shadows and create sepulchral images on the bare walls of our lives. How to give shape and form to experiences that are so close to the bone? A question that assails and haunts most of us — can art in any way capture the horror, the pain and the grief of the actuality? Yet, it is impossible to remain indifferent to the unfolding tragedy. It permeates into one’s being and becomes the lens through which reality is reassembled and reviewed.
During these hard times, I made a play called ‘Black Box’. The crumbling of the edifice of belief and faith become the all-encompassing emotion, and I found resonance in the words of Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredibility, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”
As an artist, we respond to the times, not always as a chronicler of the times, but as a witness. While making the work, the fear of the virus was all-pervasive, the loneliness of being ‘home alone’, the desperation to reach out, to speak, to connect, were manifest during the process of working.
Images of people going home, trudging along highways and on railway tracks with a trunk on their back, homeless migrants, transportation shut down, everything immobilised — mobility too is immobile — clung to my consciousness with the protagonist of the play repeating constantly: “I can’t go, can’t reach.”
A solo performance without text can be tough. Words, numbers and dates became the text, and the running leitmotif of the play. Numbers created conversation that ranged from anger to wonderment, humour, loss, helplessness and disgust. A language of numbers was created. Simple dialogues like ‘Let’s go for a walk’, ‘Hello, is anyone there?’ were played and replayed. But within that hopelessness, the actor created affirmations and set up a stage.
What else can an actor do but tell stories? Sing songs of kings and courtiers, of deals within deals, anything and everything that is required to keep the imagination and sanity intact and alive. His audience is the dog and the sparrow.
I realised that today, rather than pick up a big thick book to read, I gravitate towards a poem. Short stories have taken precedence over novels. I am unsure if the deadly virus will give me a tomorrow to finish that book, see the series on Netflix, or watch my lemon tree flower. I also understood that no matter how savage the times may be, we must sing and dance, write and share the poem that will keep us ‘alive’ and become the catalyst to move forward. Even if that forward is an empty road.
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