The pun on the back of Christopher D’Souza’s red T-shirt sums up his temperament perfectly. The front says NASA. The back says ‘I like my space’. While he jealously guards his personal space, Christopher is also fascinated with celestial space. One of his favourite books, gifted to him by his favourite teacher, Fatima Miss, has a chapter on black holes which makes a lot of sense to him, even helping him to understand death. This is quite unusual for a fifteen-years, two-months and two-day- old youngster. One states his exact age out of deference to him because Christopher is particular about details.
Christopher is no ordinary teenager. Even his dreams and aspirations are very different from those of ‘normal’ youngsters. “While I was reading it (the book Fatima Miss gave him), I thought that if I were an astronaut, I could go far away, maybe even live alone in space. It would be quiet, with just my maths book and maybe a telescope,” he muses as he turns the pages. Astronomy, Maths, solitude are precious to him. “I don’t really fit in with other people. That makes other people more uncomfortable than it makes me,” he notes in his diary, quite happy in his own space.
This extraordinary teenager, marvellously portrayed by actor Dheer Hira, was the lead character of a riveting play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which was the opening show of the seventh season of Aadyam Theatre, an Aditya Birla Group initiative. Based on Mark Haddon’s novel by the same name, and adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens, the play was further tweaked by director Atul Kumar for an Indian audience. Produced by the ARTS Company, the Indian version is set, for the most part, in the heart of Bandra, Mumbai, and it was quite apt that its premiere shows were staged, last weekend, at St. Andrews Auditorium, Bandra.
This ever-evolving locality, once known as the queen of the suburbs, was an intrinsic part of the play, charming streets, friendly people, mash-up dialect et al. Creating the ambience of the lively, Christian-dominated Chapel Street, in particular, were brilliant back projections that showed time-defying cottages, new high rises, the movement of autos, cabs and other vehicles and little patches of green. Against this warm, colourful background, apart from Christopher, ‘typical’ Bandra characters entertained us with a whodunit. However, the play was not just a thriller, raising, as it did, serious questions about what is typical and what is not, what is normal and what is not.
Neville Sukhia
At a very basic level, it is about the death of Mrs. Pinto’s dog, brutally killed with a garden tool, and the mystery about who committed this dastardly act. The Mumbai police do their cursory job of noting the details of the crime scene but clearly it is not something they are going to waste much time over. Christopher, however, is determined to get to the bottom of the incident. Like an Enid Blyton, Five Find-Outer story? To some extent, yes.
But otherwise, very different from a fun-filled Blyton adventure. Because when Christopher sets out to systematically nail the culprit, he discovers many unpalatable facts that leave him devastated; and which never appear in children’s books. Metaphors, he had dismissed as fancy distortions of truth, begin to acquire sinister connotations. For instance, as he digs deep, many a skeleton tumbles out of his family cupboards. Similarly, the apple of someone’s eye turns out to be far from being so. A stickler for truth and trust, Christopher is traumatised by events as they unfold. And when he is forced to board an overcrowded local train, his trauma increases to dreadful proportions because Christopher has a phobia about anybody touching him. Watching him cringe and cower, helplessly, in a packed, de-humanising Mumbai local, is heart-rending.
Director Atul Kumar and his talented team’s re-creation of the noise and chaos of Mumbai’s lifeline is so powerful that viewers, too, get drawn into its claustrophobic vortex. “We wanted to present the scene in the train through Christopher’s eyes, how he saw the madness around him,” says director Atul Kumar. “So, the choreographer and movements’ director, the music composer, the visual artist, the video artist, the sound designer had to, collectively, present the scene as Christopher saw it; and reproduce the commotion that terrifies him.”
More terrifying things happen in his life. What does a boy, who likes an unchanging, orderly life, who enjoys number-crunching (because “Numbers don’t change. They stay exactly what they are.”), do when his life turns topsy-turvy? Sometimes he counts prime numbers till he calms down. Sometimes, he curls up into a foetal position and watches his toy train go round and round in comforting circles. Sometimes, he counts the stars. Are these ‘typical’ coping methods of fifteen year olds?
Maybe not. But then The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is all about celebrating being not ‘typical’. Is Christopher neurodivergent? Perhaps, yes. But writer Haddon pointed out that Asperger’s Syndrome is not the centre of his story. “If anything, it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way,” he elaborated.
Atul Kumar had read Haddon’s book, a gift from his then 17-year-old daughter, some time ago. “I read the play later and fell in love with Christopher and his journey, although I had very little knowledge about Asperger’s, neurodivergence and autism. But the story is not really about all these things. It’s more about human resolve and achievement against all odds. That is what drove me towards doing it,” he reveals.
And that is what made tears of happiness roll down our cheeks at the end of Atul Kumar’s spectacularly-crafted play. Christopher overcomes many of his phobias and disappointments, having demolished the demons in his brain. In his own atypical way. Making us realise that there are many ways to live, love and trust in this world.
(Forthcoming shows at Jamshed Bhabha Theatre, NCPA, Mumbai, on December 21 and 22, 2024)
