Can lakes be moved to rescue them from the double onslaught of encroachment and the pollution that threatens to devour them? They can but only metaphorically, in the realm of art, where the imaginative prospect of the shifting of a lake mirrors the actual sense of physical and cultural loss if a waterbody amidst us were to disappear permanently.

And when the waterbody is Dal, the abiding motif of Kashmir’s natural beauty, the metaphor also resonates with irony. For, moving the lake from Valley divests the state of its identity and deprives it of its soul. Thankfully, shifting is only a hoax, a subject of the play staged at Tagore Hall as the inaugural performance in a weeklong drama festival. And the play is aptly titled April Fool.

Written and directed by the noted Kashmiri playwright Muhammad Amin Bhat, the drama simultaneously plays on two planes. One, the literal tragedy of a fabled lake that is dying by the day, losing to the marauding mafia of the vested interests in the government, the greed of the encroachers and the toxic discharge from the colonies on its banks. Second, the lake as a figurative symbol of the soul of a people, their sense of identity, a thread between their past, present and future. And what happens when it tends to go extinct.

In the Lake’s predicament, therefore, is hidden the larger dilemma of Kashmir, the trials and tribulations of its people. The first Act of the play itself reflects it in no uncertain terms. When the protagonist, a wily property dealer, breaks into dance out of no apparent cause, he explains it thus: “Puppets always dance to the tunes of a puppet master. What is wrong if puppet decides to dance to his own tune”?

... contd.