Depicting childhood traumas as on stage

Different characters from the play 'Bitter Chocolate'

Kavita Nagpal

CHILDHOOD TRAUMAS sometimes haunt one for life. A rejection by peers or denigration by adults, taunts from loved ones, neglect, rebuffs, derision, jeers, lack of love and understanding can eat as cankers and damage adult existence. A tormented childhood can scare life forever. And nothing is more disfiguring as sexual abuse. Something few are willing to talk about, let alone accept as a reality. It is because of this silence that suffering and agony is unabaited. Child abuse knows no class, race or religious barriers. It is rampant in all sections of society and is most often brushed under the carpet for fear of reprisal from the very society in which it ulcerates and festers.

Working with real life incidents from Pinki Virani's best seller Bitter Chocolate, a collection of true stories based on the traumas of abused children in India, Lushin Dubey presented a solo performance that verily shook one to the core. Directed by Arvind Gaur and sponsored by the Council for Social Development, Lushin's performance at the Habitat Basement was a histronic tour de force. Playing more than a dozen characters, the talented actress delved deep into the inner life of the tormented child and the travails of his/her near and dear ones to paint devastating pictures of aberrant morality. As a judge, she was the inquistor in a case involving a twelve-year-old girl, who lodges a complaint against her father who plies her with alcohol and invites his `bureaucrat' friends to join him in a hostel room where they watch blue flims. The disbelieving advocate harangues the child to tears. And the mother sides with her husband!

Lushin is then the social worker who rails against promiscuity and accuses young girls of inviting rape by wearing tight and revealing clothes: How can a respectable father of three girls even `think' of touching his daughter in `that way'. These `things' she advocates should remain in the family and never be brought out in the public as they pollute the mind of others. The scene shifts to the male child.(Video images are used to facilitate Lushin's quick changes). A young boy sits shivering before a lit candle. Distraught with fear, he recalls his uncle fondling and ejaculating on him. "I felt something sticky on me and ran from the room. I washed my hands ten, twenty, eighty, one hundred times but I cannot remove the slime. I cannot sleep.I cannot study. The doctor gave me downers", he fumbles in his pocket for the tablet. "I feel sleepy all the time. I am afraid and my father..."

The SP dissuades the father of a girl raped by a neighbour during Kanya Puja from registering a case to protect her reputation, for once the rape is public, she will be debarred from school and worse, no one will marry her. In any case, the cop adds, "it's not a case of attempted murder or something is it!"

A south Indian mother comes to visit Dr Renu Ghosh and tells about her daughter who has slit her wrist twice. She cannot understand this self-inflicted violence in her well-educated balanced middle class family.

The traumatized daughter confesses to being regularly violated by her brother. The mother refuses to believe the doctor and dismisses psychiatry as all mumbo jumbo! How can the only son, heir apparent, scion of the family ever do this to his own younger sister? What about the so-called upholders of the law? Their collusion in cover-ups is no less. In one of the most chilling exposes of societal indifference, Lushin plays Otto Sir, a saffron-clad spiritual guide at a boys school where he takes classes in development through mediation. Otto violates boys at will and is free to carry on because neither the school nor the family is willing to nail the monster.