Almost 36 years ago, at the end of October, I wrote my first play. It was called Lights Out . It was based on an eyewitness account of a gang-rape. One reason I was able to write the bulk of it in the course of a single weekend was the sudden lull in all my deadlines. Why? Because that was the weekend of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
This week, I received a slender little volume that means a lot to me: A stand-alone edition of that play. It’s been published before, in three separate collections. It’s about to appear in one more, a compendium of all my plays, called Blood and Laughter . It’s been filmed in three separate productions, most recently as a cineplay directed by Ritesh Menon. But I’ve always believed it could stand on its own. And here it is.
The publisher is World View Publications. The owner, Sachin Rastogi, is a passionate bibliophile who does his best to keep students supplied with affordable literary texts. He approached me through a friend, in November last year, by e-mail. He said he’d like to publish a “critical edition” of my play. I was in Elsewhere, and entering that state of pre-travel frenzy that blocks out all rational thought. So I was a little cool towards this friendly query. Plus I needed the permission of my primary publisher, Hachette India.
I had to ask Rastogi what he meant by a “critical edition”. When I understood the concept, I confessed that I didn’t have anything in the way of essays or scholarly texts in connection with Lights Out . Even though the internet suggests that there are articles and essays about the play out there, they’re not accessible to me. The best I could offer was a small collection of reviews and an interview from the days of the first few performances, in the mid-’80s. There wasn’t time to solicit a foreword or introduction written by anyone else, so I needed to do that myself. And all of this whilst also proofreading and writing introductions for the plays in Hachette’s compendium!
Throughout this negotiation, Rastogi has been unfailingly polite, mild-mannered and prompt. This was despite the fact that he had a tight deadline to meet: The commencement of the academic year. He showed me a first draft of the proposed cover on January 21. Ten days later, a first proof. I completed proofing while I was travelling and also struggling with a monster cough. On February 6, I returned the PDF to him and we firmed up the copyright page. The next day we had a final series of exchanges about the cover.
And on February 11, POP! The book was in my hands! I met Rastogi for the first time at the IIC Annexe’s reception area. On TV, there were news clips of the Aam Aadmi Party’s stunning victory. For a play that began life under a terrible shadow, it felt like a wonderful celebration.
Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column
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