Exit-stance by Atreya Sarma

Courtesy - Muse India: Issue 39, September/October 2011


Book Review

Harish Trivedi
Exit-stance
A Play
The Sharonom Media Group (2011)
895 Kentshire Drive, Dayton, Ohio 45459-2327
Pages 46+ :: Price $15.95
ISBN 978-0-578-07767-3


Drama of an old man refusing to die and hell-bent on living

Here lies OM.
OM.Com!
OM, calm at last and silenced forever!
Life has deserted OM; and Death, as always, has won!
His body was burnt not at the stakes
But at an electric crematorium. And
What remained was a heap of ashes
Salvaged from an ass-hole.
An ash hole for an asshole!
Finally dissolved with the five elements.

The above seriocomic poetic epitaph is scripted by OM – for himself, the only protagonist in the melodramatic one-Act monodrama - Exit-stance – who lives his final days in a nursing home for assisted living; and is torn between life and death, between traces of hedonism and shadowy spiritualism; and who suffers isolation and loneliness. And the character, who has none to turn to, presents us with a lot of gallows humour. In one moment, OM is curious about - and wants to see - his own death. So he says:

“No one has ever said what it’s like to be dead. I want to enjoy my death. I want to be fully aware of my final escape, the ultimate liberty!”

But in another moment, he is dead scared of death; and is insistent on living out. What for? Yes, he wants to enjoy the life the way he wants to. His libido is aroused when the nurses attend on and touch him. “… a mere thought of lust and sex keeps me alive!”

But soon he realises, albeit fleetingly, and despairs: “But what good is lust when youth has fled?” and taunts himself, “What a pathetic and perverse craving for human touch!” But is sexual urge an abomination or an abnormality for a man of his age? OM answers: “Lust and desires are normal feelings. And I think I am too just f…ing normal!” Mind you, this is not the only time OM chooses the four-letter word; he, in fact, suffers from oral diarrhoea of them. The doc tries to dissuade him from the compulsive addiction, but to no avail, for habits die hard, much less the instinctually obscene ones.

We’re treated to bouts of bawdy jokes, every now and then. He even makes fun of his name OM – the sacred Hindu syllable as well as an acronym of how he is called, Old Man. In a disgusting mood, he has this dig at his name: “I am not THAT OM! Instead of ‘OM tat sat’, I am OM tat shit…”

When it comes to the male doctors, he feels “like grabbing the crotch of a student doctor and squeezing his balls” whenever he is “upset and angry.” But the sight of a female nurse turns him on. “If this is a nursing home then why a big bosomed nurse hasn’t nursed me?” he longingly rues.

By now it’s evident that OM is certainly not in the class of a Tennyson’s Ulysses synonymous with a spirit of adventure and the concomitant heroic struggle or of a Hemingway’s Santiago, a symbol of stoic and silent struggle. OM, no doubt, has no nobler goals for the remainder of his life, yet he wages a struggle - a paranoid mental conflict; and also suffers an ethnic conflict and a cross-cultural dilemma, having his roots in India – though untraceable – but living in America. He pooh-poohs the various racial and sub-racial identities, and asks – why can’t all of us be just humans - for he finds himself to be neither an American nor an Indian? Despite his quarantined existence, “deaf and legally blind” status, a life of vacuum, “Isolation, desolation, frustration and anger,” and his body being “nothing but an ill-smelling heap of bones, skin and blood,” - he is hell-bent on surviving and continuing to live … to enjoy the good things of life!

And OM, by that very token of being an ordinary mortal like most of us, is a representative of a massive majority. So everyone can relate to and touch a chord with him. It’s how Harish Trivedi - the playwright – moulds the character of OM, in a postmodernist universal cast influenced as he is by Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett in whose birth centenary homage he wrote this play.

It needs guts and creativity of a high order to write a full length piece on the travails and derisive idiosyncrasies of a typical old man and the dreadful old age. The author has, evidently, succeeded in closely and deeply studying the geriatric psychology from various angles. He extracts the secrets from the darker recesses of the protagonist’s subconscious and makes him boldly and unhesitatingly vent his feelings.

No wonder, Harish Trivedi could bring it off what with his credentials. An Indian American – living in the US from mid 1960s – Harish has a doctorate in Theatre and Communication and is an associate of the Dramatists Guild of America. He is also a prolific journalist-poet-writer-translator – with his works appearing in English, Gujarati and Hindi. He is the founder Trustee & Chairman of the India Foundation in Dayton, Ohio; “his plays have a distinct Indian ethos” appealing to the “sense and sensibilities of viewers and readers… in the US,” says the author’s profile appended in the book.

Not everything OM chants can be dismissed as senile balderdash. Some of his observations stand out as a testimony to his wide reading, poetic taste, wit, experience, and keen observation of life. We also perceive that he is ‘bipolar’ – tossed between American materialism and Indian spiritualism, though he quips he is ‘multi-polar’ to the doctor’s diagnosis that he is bipolar. Tongue in cheek, OM remarks that the staff at the nursing home “changes frequently and fast – even more often than my bed sheets or towels.”

OM draws a nuanced distinction between freedom and liberation, while in an extreme mood of dejection. “I don’t need freedom; it is meaningless! I need liberation, liberation from my self.” All of us know that in our world - a topsy-turvy world full of hypocrisy - appearance need not be reality. See how OM puts it: “People are always pretending. Life itself is pretending – Pretending, masking, and hiding!”

Also notice how effectively OM portrays the monotony of the grind of a life lived cosmetically: “I used to go to a spa every day. Going around the jogging track, walking or running on the treadmill, lifting weights, riding a stationary bicycle… doing all that and still remaining in the same place.”

OM’s mind goes through a chiaroscuro of memories – of movies, music, books of literature, great personalities; as a result we’ve a quotation to suit his every mercurial mood. Being an American Indian, his mind sweeps across the Western world as well as India. Scriptures like the Rig Veda, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, aphoristic literature like Bhartrihari Shataka, movies like Gigi (English) Jagate Raho, and Mera Naam Joker; diverse personalities like Mahatma Gandhi, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, PB Shelley, Neil Armstrong, Mata Hari, Freud, Descartes, Maurice Chevalier, and Clarence Day are paraded before us.

All this hyperactivity of his mind erases the timelines for him so much so he feels that he exists “in a timeless zone!”

OM’s self-unsettling loneliness causes a mental drift in him. He imagines things; he sees a cat that isn’t there; and even plays with it, only to drive it away. He is ‘the Duke of Darkness’ and “a camera obscura, a dark chamber with a lens that has turned things upside down.” At the same time, his bizarre and disjointed thoughts sometimes glimmer with coherence and agreeable reason.

Mortally afraid of death, for all his iconoclastic philosophy, OM panics and collapses on seeing (in his hallucinations) a duster plane hovering over him. When he comes to, he flies into a flash of eschatological spirituality and reconciliation by invoking the Holy Grail, the Five Elements and the Shanti mantra; but even before the chant is over, he swoops down onto his wonted earthly bohemian reality where he belongs and declares “I do not need to find any holy or unholy grail… for me it is always going to be singing and dancing…,” unmindful of his irreversible physical limitations! So go on and celebrate the bacchanalian revelry!

Thus, “Important is the OM’s universality… He is a kind of everyman ranting about the injustices of life. His ethnic identity fixes the play in reality, but the specific Indian identification of OM transcends mere individual concerns…,” remarks Dr Robert Conrad, Professor Emeritus, Dept of Languages, University of Dayton, Ohio, and he proceeds to teleologize the character’s raison d’être: “OM maintains his dignity with irony and humor as he confronts his end. His disquieted suffering and his methods of coping provide a bitter hope to all who face the last stage of existence.”

The strength of this one-act & one-character play lies, perhaps, more in its performance than in its reading as a closet drama – unless the latter is taken up with necessary breaks, for otherwise the reader could feel some monotony however powerful the monologues are. The writer has incorporated elaborate stage directions; and set the play, aptly, in a late winter night. Following these directions and with assured technical effects, histrionics, and music regularly fading in and fading out - the punch and poignancy, the absurd and the black humour would briskly come into bold relief in performance. And yes, the play has a good track record: having been staged at Clayton and Cincinnati, Ohio; while the author rendered its staged reading at a theatre in Mumbai, sponsored by the government of Maharashtra.