Had I been a smoker, there could have been no better place to light up than in front of the Théâtre du Châtelet on that spring afternoon in Paris. As I waited, I reread the e-mail. “Can you be at Châtelet theatre at 7.30pm?” was director Vishal Bhardwaj’s way of setting up an appointment. It was the beginning of May, and after trying to get in touch with him for over five months and across three continents, I was finally meeting him. In front of the theatre — eerily silent, doors locked — I saw the poster of A Flowering Tree. On its left corner was a shy “mise-en-scene by Vishal Bhardwaj”.

Bhardwaj appeared in a black windbreaker and jeans, holding a thin cigarette between his fingers, extending his right hand towards me. We talked for half an hour about Maqbool, a film I am writing on, before returning to the subject of the opera I had just discovered he was directing. “Come tomorrow,” he said in Hindi. We would have lunch.

The next day, I got lost in the Parisian bridges and arrived, panting and dishevelled, 20 minutes late. I thought Bhardwaj would be offended, but he asked me to calm down instead and introduced me to his team of puppeteers. Before I could pause or wonder aloud why he needed puppeteers in an opera, he asked me about my country’s food and, soon, he and I were heading to a Mexican restaurant nearby. Over lunch, we talked mostly about his work as a Shakespearean adapter, since I’m writing about his approach to Lady Macbeth, but he also let on a few things about his new film, Haider. Based on Hamlet, it releases on October 2.

Unlike other directors who have turned to the Bard for inspiration, and are rigid about retaining ‘the exact words of the plays’ or staying true to the period — something that often produces stiff performances and boring movies, Bhardwaj looks at the story and reinvents it. After all, Shakespeare didn’t write in Hindi for the gangs of Uttar Pradesh. Bhardwaj re-imagines the text: he turns Lady Macbeth from a villain into a relatable woman, and the apparition in Hamlet into a human being who escaped being jailed wrongfully. Through the former, he comments on Indian women, and in the latter, he deals with the realities of a corrupt police force. Doing, in effect, what few others have managed to do: enrich the text he adapts from. But ask Bhardwaj why he chooses Shakespeare every time — his works are inspired by Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet — and he will tell you, he was simply looking for a good story.

Later, when we found our way back to the subject of the opera, Bhardwaj revealed that he had been approached by the Châtelet directors with several projects, until he finally accepted A Flowering Tree. The project, his first operatic endeavour, had the advantage of being in English. Based on an Indian story, it also held a cultural connection for him.

After lunch, we posed for a photograph by the street. The woman who took it for us was holding a placard. One that asked, in French, for a ticket to that night’s performance of A Flowering Tree.

That evening, for the third time in two days, I ran towards the Châtelet theatre. At the once-empty square, the queue now snaked around the block. I gave my name at the backstage counter and received my very own billet.

A Flowering Tree is an opera by John Adams (Massachusetts, 1947), adapted from the southern Indian folktale translated by AK Ramanujan. It was commissioned in 2006 for the celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday.

I must confess I am not too familiar with operas, and was expecting elaborate dresses and over-the-top scenery. As the curtain rose, the first thing that struck me was the minimalistic set-up on stage — several earthen vases stood in neat rows, holding long blades of grass. The cast came in next, singing and ‘harvesting’ the grass, leaving a barren stage where the protagonist failed to find food among the pots.

A Flowering Tree tells the story of Khamuda, a poor girl who lives with her mother and sister. They struggle to make a living until she discovers she can turn into a tree: once transformed, her sister plucks her flowers and they are able to sell them in the market. She marries the prince, who asks her to transform into a tree for him every night, and they are happy. The prince’s sister, however, discovers Khamuda’s secret and asks her to perform, but instead of helping her return to her human form, she abandons her, leaving Khamuda to wander the land as a half-tree-half-human monster. The prince too unravels and wanders aimlessly until his sister recognises him and out of pity tells him what happened to his bride. The lovers are reunited and Khamuda is a woman again.

I noticed that when the sisters arrived in the market, the crowd greeted them with the words “Flores flores, lindas flores, lindas flores”, which is Spanish for “flowers, flowers, beautiful flowers”. Why were the words in Spanish? When I asked Bhardwaj’s assistant later that evening, he conjectured that Adams chose a language widely spoken in the US. But I suspect he simply wanted to generate strangeness by using a foreign language that would clash phonetically with the rest. The Spanish — my native tongue — was not correct even. Clearly, Adams did not choose it because he was proficient in it. In that moment, I realised the magnitude of the work by Vishal Bhardwaj: the composer may have started from an Indian folktale, and he may have provided visual elements that traced its roots to India, but he didn’t want to make its retelling Indian alone.

Many adaptations overemphasise fidelity to their source. Bhardwaj, however, dips into the well to be inspired by the spirit of the source material, and strives to transmute it into another version, even at the risk of mangling the original. As a screenwriter, this means altering Shakespearean plays until they are barely recognisable. As an opera director, this brought out the underlying Indian origin of the story, even if the original text had left it behind a long time ago.

Bhardwaj did everything he could to keep the story true to its origin. The technical team — the costume designers, the puppeteers, the assistant director and the choreographer, who is also a dancer — was entirely Indian. Leafing through pictures of other productions of A Flowering Tree, it seems that the go-to method for every portrayal is to use Indian costumes to convey the location. This production was no different in that aspect — the cast wore traditional costumes, the blonde lead singer wore a black wig and all the other women on stage had large bindis nestled between their eyebrows.

Apparently, other productions tend to be minimalistic in their use of props and scenery too. Bhardwaj’s mise-en-scene, while very sparse, is perhaps the most elaborate of all. Possibly the most imposing element on the stage was a huge figurine of Nataraja in the backdrop, lighting up in harmony with the choreography.

My favourite addition, however, was the puppets. Khamuda’s mother and sister, as well as the evil princess, were represented not by actors but puppets. Under the care of master puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee, the sculptured marionettes brought to the stage a hint of the kathputli tradition, among others. Most of all, though, their presence helped bring onstage a certain childishness and playfulness, reminding the audience of the tale’s folk origins.

My evening ended close to midnight. I learned that there are no parties after dress rehearsals, but nevertheless I got invited to a quiet bar for a drink with the crew. Later, after walking Bhardwaj to a taxi, the assistant director and I trudged back to our hotels in the Quartier Latin.

I kept returning to the moment when, at intermission, I found Bhardwaj in a crowd of smokers. I was expecting to see him surrounded by adoring fans, but he stood alone. “Nobody knows me here,” he said, and I was truly sorry that the people around us didn’t realise that the man they were praising in French was standing right next to them.

At the end of the first act, Khamuda and the prince — as dancers, not singers — were bathed by purple light and a shower of petals, while the orchestra swelled. The scene was impossibly beautiful, and I wish I could have taken a picture. Sadly, none of the publicity images I’ve found so far truly capture the magic of this scene. If nothing else, I hope the memory of Khamuda held by her prince, while thousands of white petals fall around them, will remain with me forever. That and the fact that at midnight after saying goodbye to everyone, just outside my hotel, a Bengali man offered to sell me a jasmine in French.

( Ana Laura Magis Weinbergis a writer and translator from Mexico City )

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