Waiting for a new dawn

The play starts with Somu,a young man,writing his diary. Slowly his friends trip in one by one,led by their mentor and guide Bhaida. The youngsters – Mintoo,Bunty,Michael,Rana,G.K.,Rajada,Jaggi,Shamim,Shibu,Jai,Peter and Ranju have only one thing in common- a hope for a better tomorrow.

As the play progresses,we realise that Shamim is an introvert who refuses to open his mouth. Mintoo,who knows neither English nor Hindi,is the butt of everyone’s jokes. Bunty and Somu are childhood friends but have diverse educational and social backgrounds. The new entrant,G.K. is brought in by his distraught mother and immediately packed off to the detox centre taboo to others.

Bunty and Somu are caught by the authorities and beaten up when they try to reach him and empathise with him. Eventually,G.K. comes out to join the rest and it transpires that he,like several others,has been in and out of rehabs through his youth.

Basically in Hindi,the play uses Bengali and English too. It is Rangakarmee’s first multilingual production that expands the horizons of its audience. Bhor brings to life the pathos that underlies the surface bonhomie of youngsters of different ages.

“My constant interaction with the urban youth introduced me to the dark and dangerous world of addiction,addicts and rehab centres. I realised that this is kept away from the limelight because people do not feel easy talking about it. I personally visited rehab centres,spoke to the inmates and even to some of their parents. I learnt about drug addiction and the long and painful process that leads to rehabilitation. The parents did not even want to admit that their children were drug addicts. This triggered the desire to present a microcosm of their world through a play and Bhor was born,” says Ganguly.

The cast of Bhor is huge and comprises mostly of non-actors. But Ganguly did this by design. “I wanted to work with non-actors because it helps me mould them into the character as they do not have preconceived notions about how to approach a given character. There is a freshness in their performance,” she explains. The emphasis is on the claustrophobia of the young inmates of the rehab centre,their constant mood swings and the obsessive compulsive disorder some of them suffer from.

Running like an undercurrent through the play are questions on what drew them to drugs? Is it a fragmented home environment? Or,is it poverty? Is it the desire to belong to a given peer group? Or,is it out of some inner frustration they cannot put a finger on? Explanation is superfluous as action and execution say it all.

The audience is pulled towards the collective tragedy of this group,distanced and alienated from the mainstream which,at one point,they do not wish to go back to. Bhor is a metaphor of hope for the neglected,the marginalised and the ignored. The scenario could be shifted from a rehab to a hospital ward for young people,or,a prison cell in a juvenile delinquents’ correctional home. The stories would still have been as tragic,as sad and as tinged with that bright ray of sunshine at the end of the dark tunnel,spelling out the true meaning of its name – Bhor.