Act I Scene I
To be performed at every street corner.
A young man enters, holding a dead woman in his hands.
He carefully circles the ‘stage’ and slowly,
reverentially lays the body at the centre.
Young Man:
Poetry is dead. So is her sister,
Freedom of expression.
No one can talk. Except their words
Our pens have dried up
Our tongues excised.
All our institutions corrupted
Constitutional heads compromised
Our kaleidoscopic nation
Has been reduced to mere
Shards of glass–
Colourless; same.
You think they are targeting the other
But their aim is us, you fools
Don’t you see?
The brainwash?
The deep perfidy of it?
A platoon of soldiers marches in.
They arrest the young man,
frog march him off,
leaving the dead woman
at the centre stage.
Narayanan Vaidya is a metallurgist and a wordsmith.
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