Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry remembers Surjit Patar, her friend, muse and collaborator

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

When a griot (storyteller) dies, a library burns down — African proverb

No, this is not an obituary, nor will I refer to Surjit Patar in the past tense. I find it difficult to wrap my head around the loss of a friend, muse and creative collaborator. Lines from Joan Didion’s book ‘The Years of Magical Thinking’ keep recurring in my mind, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” Writing about him is hard, as I knew from the moment I met him that I was in the presence of an artist who carried his greatness lightly.

Writers are dangerous creatures. they wrest open through words the secrets of the universe. Patar wrote with a poetic elegance and a fierce imagination about the complexities of human nature. Today, when he is not amongst us, I can still hear his poems in the chirping of the birds, murmur of the wind, the gurgling of water, the protest of the farmers and the pain of the marginalised.

I knew him as a playwright, and his translations of plays — ‘Naga Mandala’, ‘Yerma’, ‘Mad Women of Chaillot’, ‘Wife’s Letter’ and many more — a mind-boggling range from Rabindranath Tagore to Toni Morrison, and from Jean Racine to Girish Karnad, were translocated within the Punjabi ethos. I never dreamt that my chance meeting with Surjit Patar in 1987 would turn out to be so momentous, to use a cliché — life altering.

One summer evening, I had gone to the Department of Indian Theatre, Panjab University, Chandigarh, to watch a play based on a Punjabi adaptation of ‘Blood Wedding’ by Federico Garcia Lorca. The play stunned me by the cadence of its language, which was idiomatic, rich, lyrical and passionate. The language in the play went to the heart of everything that I was searching for and I was determined to meet the writer. I wrote to Patar introducing myself and implored him for a meeting.

At home in Chandigarh, one day the doorbell rang. I opened the door and saw a slightly built, inscrutable man wearing a blue turban and a striped shirt with an envelope in his hand. He said, “Er…..I received this letter.” I looked at the letter fluttering in his hands and was completely bewildered. Of course, it was Patar, Surjit Patar himself!

As a couple of months had elapsed since the letter, I had forgotten my impulsive gesture. I invited him for a cup of tea and he sat opposite me with a certain degree of discomfort. We tried to strike a conversation but each sentence meandered into silence. Like an epiphany, I knew that this unexpected meeting with this magical man was going to enrich me and therefore my work.

After a garbled narration, I gave him the script of ‘Naga Mandala’ , asking him if he could consider translating it into Punjabi. “Par ke dasdan han” (I will read and get back). Patar got back to me later, expressing his reluctance in translating a play which had a snake as the main protagonist. Girish Karnad, the playwright, had woven two folktales in an intricate scaffolding of the illusionary and the real. Myth, magic and metaphor abound in the text, with the snake as the central image.

Later, Patar said, “I hesitated because I was not familiar with the language of theatre, I was unsure of dealing with the leitmotif of the snake. Having been nurtured on the tradition of ‘realistic drama’, I presumed that the snake was a physical requirement for staging the play. I kept on grappling with the issue, until it struck me that this was an area which the director had to resolve. The word chhaleda (which in Punjabi means an illusionist) became my catalyst. A person who can take any form or shape, a woman can transform into an apsara; and a man into a snake — the word chhall, which can also mean a trick or illusion, became my starting point.

Naag kisey ne sune na ronde,

Naag sune na gaunde,

Naag kise ne vekhe nahin aadam

roop vataunde,

Icchadhari naag di lokon aksar

katha sunaunde,

Naganiyan jo nara baniyan,

Zikar unha de aunde.

Main jo naag han,

Naag nahin han,

Kaam da ik dariya han,

Main kudrat han,

Keval kudrat,

Iccha da bhareya han.

(No one has seen a snake cry.

Neither heard a snake sing.

Nor has anyone seen a snake

transform into a human form,

Yet stories of snakes transforming into human being are frequently heard.

I am a snake, also not a snake.

I am an ocean of aspirations

I am nature/God

Filled with desires)

Patar’s gripping translation with layers of sub-text had Girish Karnad remark, “I will now retranslate the Kannada ‘Naga Mandala’ from the Punjabi text!” His translation had a razor-sharp intuition, which made him plunge into the nerve and arteries of the narrative and like a magician pull out meaning after meaning.

For many years, I had been toying with the idea of cooking on stage to explore the potential of entering into another world; a world filled with the aroma of mustard seeds and cumin, red pepper and asafoetida. Could actors perform while peeling onions and could musicians sing while cooking pakoras and jalebis, was my challenge.

The next inevitable step was to ring up my muse and share my idea of directing a play that was set in a community kitchen. Patar was intrigued and suggested playfully, “I will have to write the play with a ladle, not a pen.” We had endless conversations until he said with finality, “Give me a story and I will create a play.”

A desperate search had me spending endless nights looking for stories about women and food. Isabel Allende’s sensorial ‘Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses’ to Laura Esquivel’s ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ became the source material and ‘Kitchen Katha’ took birth.

Patar in the play evoked the sound of onions browning in oil, the syncopated rhythm of a knife mincing vegetables, a mortar grinding seeds, the burble of a boiling pot. The songs in the play were recipes:

Dhar de kadahi agg te,

Vich paa de ni saron da tel.

Naam laike sacche rab da,

Jehda melda sajjan naal mel.

Aloo katt. Gobhi katt,

Baingan vee jhat pat,

Katti ja ajey na hatt,

Bukh nalon bahut ghat,

Hor katt, hor katt

(Put the vessel on the fire, pour mustard oil while chanting the name of God.

Chop potatoes, chop cauliflower,

chop aubergines. Don’t stop

chopping until everyone has been fed).

It always surprised me that Patar felt no ownership with the work he created. He was neither possessive, nor authorial. Once the translated script was completed, he vanished, almost vaporised. His wife Bhupinder Kaur was my ally and it is due to her efforts that Patar was persuaded to watch the play whenever it was performed. I interpreted this trait as a visarjan, a detachment once the task was over.

It would be easy for me to label his work as magic realism, but that would be like slotting his free-wielding pen in some imagined silo. He used fantasy to write the truth, and shared the truth through inventiveness and make-believe. Patar had the magic wand that turned everything that he touched into gold. The ideas and images that he conjured through his plays and poems became reminders of ephemerality and hope.

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