Water Lilies (A Trilogy) : Gowri Ramanarayan

They meet at random public places, make sweet and striking conversations, keep you gripped and thinking (all in half an hour) and go back- with each of them and each of us, feeling more free and resolved than before.

Gowri Ramanaryan’s Water Lilies is an inspiration of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (which is a compilation of around 250 of his oil paintings depicting Monet’s extravagant art) and manages to engage and enchant you, just the same.

This is a play showcasing three stories of half hour each: Fawn Lilies, Water Lilies and Black Lilies, each accommodating in it a man and a woman - both coming from different racial backgrounds. Each having a mesh of past particulars, each coming to meet the other by coincidence, each exchanging enriching conversation and each returning back to his/her own life with a renewed hope and way of living.

Being united with the one single thread of Water Lilies, in different ways for each different story, this play is as refreshing as an afternoon’s satisfying siesta, or an evening’s hot cup of coffee. Read along!

Fawn Lilies:

The first play in the trilogy, this story is a scene set in a park in Ohio. A gay vagabond (played by Ishwar Srikumar) who marches along for noble causes meets a young bird- watching dietician from Vijaywada (played by Sunandha Raghunathan). She is talkative and inquiring, fascinated by nature, birds and their beauty, and their conversation hovers much around the same. The vagabond goes on to relate his experiences as a “tree-sitter”, a cause that fought for the preservation of trees; his occurrences are interesting but not uncomplicated. The girl is curious and zealous to know more about his circumstances, problems and his road to survival and peace, only for him to learn later that the girl herself is a wanderer, looking out for that same peace within her. After being distraught when her boyfriend leaves her for war, she holds on to her past by taking on his passions and becoming a bird- watcher herself (her boyfriend’s first passion). She has clung on to her melancholic memories like a withered branch to its tree.

The vagabond provides the freshness that is needed to that branch; His recital of the poem “Fawn Lilies” as answer, details the blossom of fresh fawn lilies over marshland, showing her a life beyond her own slush.

The girl feels invigorated, says goodbye and the play is switched to the next story.

Ishwar Srikumar as the gay vagabond was pleasant as performer, although there’s nothing in particular that refreshes my mind for extra brownies or minus points that could go out to him. Sunandha as the bird - watching dietician played her part too gracefully to be natural in some parts (and too happy to be sad in some others) but for the whole, the story was so meaningful that it reached out well.

The actors left spreading a good part of their attained freshness to the viewers and so we were happy.

Water Lilies:

This was my 2^nd preferred enactment in the play (my favorite is the story that follows).

This part of the play can very well be a dedication to Claude Monet. Here a calm and dignified Sri Lankan woman (wonderfully enacted by Akhila Ramnarayan) and a Lebanese banker (played by V Balakrishnan) meet in a Houston art museum. The Sri Lankan is arrested with the paintings of Monet - the Water Lilies Collection, when the banker, one who is not so fascinated by Monet, interrupts and gives her details about Monet’s life even so (There are interesting facts to know, for e.g.: Monet used unconventional shades of paint for this art, and became known for the same, but it was his cataract that misled him really, Monet didn’t even know the colors he would use exactly! A fact that Monet was both aware and unhappy about.) On further conversation, the Lankan lady reveals the reason for her affinity for Monet’s Water Lilies - one which stems from a disturbing and destructive event that took place in her childhood. After which, a poem “How to paint a Water Lily” by Ted Hughes, she passionately reads aloud for him. It is the last lines of the poem that ring in the ears of the banker over and over again:

Ignorant of age as of hour— Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still As a painting, trembling hardly at all

Though the dragonfly alight, Whatever horror nudge her root.

This is what the Lankan woman embodies to him, a woman who was beautiful and still like the water lily, despite the ugly roots and surroundings she was grown in.

Akhila Ramnarayan looks like a splendid performer; one can’t tell if it’s her or the character that is etched out for her that makes her look it - even so she carries it out perfectly! She uses the word “yes” as an answer to most of her co-actor’s questions in the play, and like in the words of her co-actor himself, we don’t know another woman who says the word so often and so singly, with more meaning than anything else. She is the reason I give my credits to this one. Her co-actor, V Balakrishna tends to get overshadowed by her own splendor, but refrains from taking anything away from the play, nonetheless.

Black Lilies:

Okay, now this is no biggie in terms of its story. But I love it for its excellent performances, and sweet sense of humor (only few things hold sweet to me without it.)

A Serbo-Hungarian writer (my favorite performer in the play - Dhritiman Chatterji) meets a young and simple school teacher from Tamil Nadu (endearingly played by Prateeksha) in the Washington airport, only sometime after the 9/ 11 attack. The resulted flight delays bring them together and in conversation. Mildly critical but more intrigued by the girl’s faith in chanting the hundred names of God to ward off the thunder that scares and surrounds her, the writer (whom the girl discovers to be a Nobel Prize winner) relates to her a dark story, apparently an idea for his next novel but which is infact a projection of his own life’s tales, evils and conflicts, (also involving a nightmare that most torments him - white lilies turning black).

Flooding her with irrepressible questions, the writer is looking for his own life’s answers. The girl, with her simple faith and simple strength (she goes back to her grand father’s stories and the Indian scriptures to do so) assures him that the dark clouds are only to pass. The story ends with the announcement of their flight, after the delay when the girl says, “The storm is gone”, and the novelist responds, “Not gone yet, the skies are just cleared enough to take off”, thus offering to us, his feeling of freedom, that common end - emotion to all the stories and a resplendent closure to the trilogy.

Dhritiman Chatterji, is a senior and experienced artist - it shows and how. He is just brilliant! His immaculate control over the English language, smooth delivery and great sense of humor (even his dark story is let out with the same) keeps you dazzled. Prateeksha - young, simple and sturdy proves her presence as poignant; it is the same simple strength of her as the school teacher that is matched to him, and matchless.

This is the play that covers up for all those little loopholes you may find in between.

For other credits, the piano is consistently played through the enactment by Anil Srinivasan. Subtly and wonderfully, he does his work by the side. The stage too, in terms of its setting does so much with so little!

Gowri Ramanarayan definitely makes what we call good theater. It is her from that we get those thoughtful dialogues (which is really the soul of the play), some really good performances, and a very meaningful storyline- the woman behind the stage, she deserves the loudest round of applause.

Given a chance, watch out for this one- a production of Just us Repertory, Chennai this play may just make the rounds to your city sometime soon - and this is excellent value for money too, a hundred rupees for a trip to freedom is after all, priceless!