Loss and Longing

Memories can be painful, but they also make life more meaningful

- Alpana Chowdhury

“AT the age of 80, Amma has become swaarthi (self-centred),” states Amma’s daughter affectionately, while indulging her mother’s newfound whims and fancies. Not just swaarthi, Amma has become youthful too. “Jawaani samay par kyon nahi aati hai (Why does youth not make its presence felt at the right time?)?” the daughter asks as she watches her mother discard her sari and slip into a ‘gown’, also known colloquially as ‘nightie’, that item of liberating clothing which makes Amma an altogether new person. After moaning for days on end for her recently dead husband, refusing to leave her bed in her son’s house, and turning a stubborn back to all pleas of ‘Amma utho’ (Wake up Mother), Amma has turned over a new leaf in her daughter’s house.

In her husband’s restrictive household, Amma had secretly helped her daughter enjoy the simple pleasures of youth. Now, the daughter wants Amma to enjoy the same and has brought her to her house, to introduce her to a wider, new world. Breathing freely here, and with transgender Rosie advising her on everything, from beauty care to travel, Amma begins to bloom again. “This is the right time for jawaani,” muses her daughter, looking at her newfound desires. “When we are young we are too innocent to understand what jawaani is.”

The young-at-eighty Amma was the lead character of a Hindi-Urdu show, titled Dastan-e-Ret Samadhi, which was performed at the recent Prithvi Theatre Festival in Mumbai. Based on Geetanjali Shree’s novel, Ret Samadhi, whose English translation, Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker prize in 2022, the dastan (story) was directed and adapted for the stage by historian, writer, director and actor Mahmood Farooqui.

Farooqui, who has revived the Urdu, oral art of storytelling,