File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9811, message 28


Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:53:05 -0400
From: Tuna Chatterjee <tchatterjee-AT-thunderhouse.com>
Subject: play for thanksgiving


what do you think runi?
should we see this during thanksgiving?

-tuna



India Today
North American Edition
Oct 26, 1998

Alternate Accent | Tunku Varadarajan

AN INDIAN WHO SCORES A CENTURY can always count on me to buy him a
drink. And when that ton is chalked up in New York, I will gladly make
that a Patiala peg of the finest Scotch. Aasif Mandvi, your next
Glenlivet is on me.

Mandvi, a young actor who was born in the place that was once called
Bombay, has just completed the 100th performance of Sakina's Restaurant,
his emotional and inventive one-man show, staged off-Broadway at The
American Place Theatre. Let me be honest: I found the performance a
trifle over-acted, the jokes sometimes flat, and the plot-line
occasionally as thin as the hair on Mandviís head. But there can be no
denying that his little play is a landmark in the cultural history of
Indians in America.

The one-man show is a devilish genre, making demands on an actor's
skills and energy that other forms of theatre seldom make. I was proud
of Mandvi on the night I went to The American Place Theatre, impressed
by his audacity. I was proud that an Indian was baring his immigrant
soul on-stage before usóan audience of black New Yorkers, white New
Yorkers, well-heeled Indian Manhattanites and several Gujaratis who had
come as a large group from New Jersey (armed with plastic bags full of
sev and dalmoth).

Why am I writing about Sakina's Restaurant, over three months after it
first began? The answer is simple: I want readers to go and see the
show, which runs till the end of the year. Go as a family, as there is a
lesson here for every generation. Drive to New York, and the debate in
the car on the way home is likely to be spirited, lively and
contentious.

Mandvi's show tells the story of Asgi (short, I presume, for Asghar), a
Kutchi immigrant who comes to work as a waiter in his uncle Hakim's
restaurant in New York. He comes with bloated aspirations, and wants to
become "an American millionaire". (Ironically, he is the character whom
Mandvi portrays the least successfully, giving him such terrible lines
as this: ìEvery night I have a dream. I am a great tandoori chicken
wearing an Armani suit.) The other main characters--all played by
Mandvi--are Hakim's wife Farida, and their children, Sakina and Samir.

Sakina's Restaurant should be compulsory viewing for Indians in America,
for many of us will see our own lives writ large on stage. For example,
which woman over 40 will not identify with Farida, who is lonely at home
and isolated, as her husband is out working all day?

I spoke to Prema Vora of Sakhi, a non-profit support group for South
Asian women, and she pointed out that many Indian women here lead
solitary lives. More grimly, she points out that Indian husbands who
abuse their wives, often subject them to enforced isolation. She said:
"There are women who can't even use the phone. Their husbands want a
complete accounting of everything. They leave home so rarely that they
don't even know how to use the subway."

Mandvi's character Hakim is not an abusive husband. He is, however, a
tortured man, and this is reflected clearly in that other great arena of
trauma for Indians in this countryóthe relationship between stubbornly
ìIndianî parents and their ìtoo Americanî children. This is where, I
think, Mandvi's play can perform a useful social role. The most
disconcerting part of the playóand, therefore, the most convincingówas
the dialogue of the deaf between father and daughter over an arranged
marriage, her American boyfriend, her "obscene" skirts, his traditional
demands. At one point, he addresses his daughter in Gujarati, demanding
that she answer him in his mother-tongue. She cannot, or perhaps does
not want to. "You will never be an American girl," he rails at her, his
frustration now bursting its banks.

Geeta Bhatt, a psychotherapist from Forest Hills, tells me that this is
the most complex problem facing Indians in America today, this
ìin-between generationî, which has a cultural identity crisis.
Describing a pathology that was precisely that of Sakina in the play,
she says of this generation: ìThey want to go 10 steps ahead of their
parents, but instead they take five gingerly steps and end up being
afraid of what their parents will say.î

Mandvi, to be fair, prescribes no solutions. It is not the job of a
playwright to raise questions and answer them. But in portraying an
Indian immigrant family on stage so deftlyóas well as the familyís
traumas, dissension, rifts and cleftsóhe has surely helped us to do
something at which we are notoriously bad. He has helped us, I think, to
talk across generations. That is why I want as many of us as possible to
go and see his show. And if Sakinaís Restaurant has a cathartic effect
on some fathers and daughters, mothers and sons... why, they too should
buy Mr Mandvi a large drink. He deserves one.

Sakina's Restaurant, at The American Place Theatre, 111 West 46th
Street, New York.
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---------------------------------------------------------------
C. J. S. Wallia,  Ph.D.
Publisher, IndiaStar Review of Books
http://www.indiastar.com
Phone and Fax: (510) 848-8200
P.O. Box 5582, Berkeley, CA 94705, U.S.A.
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