Marriage, Midlife, and a Marathi Play

My personal take on Adwait Dadarkar’s Eka Lagnachi Pudhchi Goshta — a Marathi play that held up a mirror to my marriage.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the idea of boredom in a marriage. Memories of the dreadful lockdown have come rushing back. I’ve finally admitted to myself that the pandemic didn’t just upend our careers, health, and daily routines — it also brought a seismic shift in our relationships.

That’s when I came across the play Eka Lagnachi Pudhchi Gosht listed at the NMACC (Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre). I booked a ticket without hesitation, hoping it might offer some clarity about the changes in my marriage — changes that, while seemingly natural, still left me searching for understanding. I wanted to see others in similar situations and, perhaps, find some validation for what I was feeling.

Now, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way. I am a Gujarati girl born in Surat and bred in Mumbai, erstwhile Bombay. I am ‘quite fluent’ in Marathi, thanks to my shejaris (neighbours) who fed me garam-garam aamti bhaat in my favourite 4-compartment steel plate almost every afternoon while my mother was dutifully caring for a paralysed relative. My uncle had been bedridden for eight years after he was in an accident. During this difficult time, my paternal grandmother and mum took turns to look after him, whereas I spent a significant part of the first six years of my life frolicking in and out of our neighbours’ house.

It is there that my ability to speak Marathi and my immense love for aamti bhaat were born. That was before I tasted the Malwani kombdi wade and was completely blown away, but let’s save that topic for another day. The point is, I give the credit for my Marathi-speaking skills to my Maharashtrian neighbours and not the Marathi manus I am married to. I honestly feel my husband even looks a bit like Manoj (...only better) - played by Prashant Damle. 

You don’t have to see the famous ‘Eka Lagnachi Gosht’ to make sense of the sequel. Even in isolation, this play is a complete story. Manoj and Manisha (Kavita Lad-Medhekar) are nearing their 20th wedding anniversary, not without turbulence. The story is told from Manisha’s point of view, who is left to figure out alone how to ‘service’ their marriage, like they service their car. Her resilience to keep her marriage alive in the face of her husband’s complete emotional absence is tested as she struggles to resign herself to the loss of her own youth. Even then, she fortifies herself emotionally to tolerate her husband’s bickering, which has become quite a second nature to him. Manisha does not want to leave her husband. Period. There is no question about it. He is the man she adores, the wonderful human being she married. She never loses sight of all the reasons to stay with him, even though he stops seeing her. She becomes invisible to him while their son still remains the apple of his eye.

As much as she is struggling to come to terms with her own mid-life crisis, she is hurt by the double standards of her husband. How come the son comes soaring above even as tempers fly with other people? Manisha spells out this deeply disturbing question, even though it is not easy for a woman to say it out loud. Never mind the barrage of jokes and the roars of laughter in the theatre, if you are a woman seeking rebalance in her marriage, there is no way you will forget this line because it strikes such a deep chord.

It is the son who comes to his mother’s rescue. He hatches a plan to end Manisha’s misery using psychological tricks. Manisha follows it to the T, not without repeated warnings to the audience that this method is specific to her situation and is dangerous to replicate. 

These days, after every story I’ve read to my toddler, he asks me, ‘What is the moral of the story?’. Of course, I would not tell him this story for many more years to come, but when I do, I will tell him that, like your vehicle, your marriage also requires regular servicing. How you maintain it is your prerogative. The bottom line is - find your own way to solve a problem that is so common to all marriages. Also, all the members of a family won’t necessarily love each other in equal measure. That shouldn’t be a reason for hurt. Why put a number on love as long as you always have each other’s back.

(The writer is a journalist based in Mumbai.)