Plebeians -- the only copy was to be found at Max Mueller Bhavan -- is a fascinating play that operates in a maze of historical and moral subtexts. It is based on facts: the June 17, 1953 workers' uprising in East Berlin, the government's attempts to suppress them and the workers' hopeless appeal to the nations' greatestintellectuals for support. In Plebeians, we have Brecht, referred to as the Boss, rehearsing a revolutionary adaptation of Shakepeare's Coriolanus. The aggrieved workers burst into the rehearsals and demand his support, believing what his plays and ways indicate that he is a friend of the people. On the other hand, the State too woos the Boss and his Berliner Ensemble for support against the workers. Caught between conflicting loyalties, the Boss finds himself trapped in an escalating tragic crisis.Fresh out of college, we Calcuttans thrived on politics and the arts. But none of us was ready for political theatre as explosive as this. No wonder there were near-riots in Germany when Plebians was first staged in 1965. Strangely, it was only last Sunday that a copy -- perhaps the second one in India -- of the Plebeians surfaced in my house, sent across by Ashok Mandanna, himself a name in Bangalore's theatre world. And four days later we learned that the writer whose symbol is theSnail -- Rushdie calls him ``the Social Democrat mollusc'' -- had got the Nobel.

My tryst with Grass began thus: impressed with Amitava Roy, a theatre fiend who teaches drama at Rabindra Bharati University, for his rendition of the Boss at a play-reading session, Grass agreed to direct us in a production of the Plebeians, which he later went on to dub as two of the best he's seen -- the other being the Royal Shakespeare Company's production in London.

It was tough. A hostile and suspicious Marxist government did not help. Already, theories were being circulated that The Flounder's real mission -- CIA-inspired at that -- was to probe the CPI(M) government's activities! The Reds were so paranoid that a DD interview with today's Nobel laureate was mysteriously spiked.

And so it was left to Roy to delve into his meagre personal savings to see meals of khichdi, which Grass and his wife Ute shared happily, was all that the cast was offered. But the old man with the moustache was available to allof us. In between rehearsals we spoke a lot. Mostly about the play and occasionally about Calcutta. We were staging it in Bengali and I still remember how, in spite of not knowing the language, Grass knew precisely where we were. He was very particular about purity of language and would insist on having the meaning and context of each word explained to him.

Later, I went on to learn that as one of the key members of the `rubble literature' school and the famous activist writers' Group 47, Grass often argued eloquently of the effects of the Nazi period on the German language and the need to purify and reinvent it. He wrote about Group 47 in The Meeting at Telgte, but he threw it 300 years back in time.

During Grass's Calcutta sojourn, Group 47 inspired some young poets of the city to persuade him to spend an evening with them. We later came to know that Grass hated such things with reason. At the pub, the poets got drunk and fought with each other to click exclusive pictures with the celebrity andhis wife.

It pained Grass no end. He did not talk about it the next day at rehearsals. But I came to know because one of the poets, a promising firebrand from Bangladesh, came back to apologise. I happened to be the messenger boy bearing his note to Grass. Later on, Grass agreed to forget about the whole affair and even helped him get political asylum in Germany.

In January '87, our play came to life at the Akademi and Mukta Angan. It was great. Open to attack from the Left and the Right, its present-day relevance was fascinating. ``I wrote this play to expose the lies of both the capitalists of West Berlin who publicised the workers' revolution as the people's revolution and the Communists of East Berlin who damned it as counter revolution,'' Grass said in an interview. Maybe that's why the state government ignored it. The critics and the audience liked it.

But we could only manage regular performances for another month or so.``All the ages intersect in Calcutta,'' Grass would often say. ``All writersmust come to this city.'' Knowing Grass, I was never sure what he meant. I understood when he came out with Tsunge Zeigen (Show Your Tongue), an acerbic book with illustrations that spoke only of the horrors of Calcutta. The motif was Kali's tongue, and Calcuttans till date haven't forgiven him. Roy asked him why he did it. After all, everything isn't bad about Calcutta. ``Why not?'' Grass is said to have replied, ``Everyone knows and talks about the good parts. I want to talk about the worst.''

I didn't like it then. What particularly irked and shocked was that ``our friend Grass'' could do such a thing. I felt betrayed. Today, 12 years later, I think I have come to terms with it. What he said was the truth. Maybe that's why some of us have left Calcutta.