All I needed

Life's been full of false starts and stops recently.  I'm not upset or depressed - far from it, in fact - but I am a little bit stressed with the O levels and A levels on my tail.  

The students are jittery and I remember, with sympathy, sleepwalking through those exams; so exhausted that all I did when I came home was fall into deep and dreamless naps and wake, horrified and guilty that I wasn't studying.  Now, I was starting to feel guilty that they weren't and the relentless grind wasn't giving any of us much chance to recalibrate.  

At the end of a week of a lot of running around and very little sleep, I was invited by my good friend Sindhu to her theatre showcase.  Sindhu (or Sid to us) was part of an incubation group for young theatre practitioners for a year and for their final showcase, the group put on an interpretation of the T.S. Eliot poem, The Wasteland.  

Before Sunday, Sid told Amanda, Bear and I that we might find the production too avant garde and experimental.  She needn't have worried.  It was pretty unorthodox, but we enjoyed ourselves and I was inordinately moved at points.  

At the door, one of the ladies told us that one of the ideas behind the piece was that the actors had discovered their meanings of life.  We were to try and find ours.  I was tired, having run down from eight hours of work, and not completely ready to think deep thoughts just then, but the doors opened, and we ran with it.  

The set, scented with a smoke machine and perfumed oils, was split into sections for the performers to build little nests within.  One fragment was hung with embroidery and knitted pieces and another had books and marigolds hanging from the ceiling.  One of the actors had even filled the floor of her space with grey sand and desert rocks.  Sindhu's corner, a velvet den glowing with candles, fairy lights and a mosaic of drapes and mementos, was at once beautiful and sad, a tribute to times and people gone by.  

We were allowed to walk around the set during the performance and Amanda and I found ourselves touching things and standing, fascinated, under fishing line hung with apples and naked bulbs that pulsed and glowed.  

Throughout, I kept feeling snatches of something unfathomable.  Sure, it seemed uncomfortably experimental and possibly inaccessible, but there was also something deep and real winding beneath the surface that kept slipping through my fingers.  It was as if the stories and thoughts of real souls were woven in with the acting and if you only felt your way, you would touch something incredibly poignant. 

Sid, dressed as a faded, desperate Cleopatra, sobbed on a chair under a rich canopy of silks.  She didn't appear to see us, that is, until the end.

As the performance drew to a close, the actors picked up brown envelopes that they had secreted in corners and started to give them to the audience.  All around us, people were unfolding white pieces of paper with various "meanings of life" scribbled on them - things about giving yourself away or holding on tightly.  The sound was rising to a crescendo and people were speaking unintelligibly, tasting lines from the poem on the incensed air. 

Just as I was feeling left out, I saw Sindhu coming in our direction.  As she neared us, we made eye contact and her face lit up with a smile that felt like it was meant just for me.  In character, she knelt before us and gently pushed a letter into my hand.   

Then in a deep greeting of peace, Sid pressed her palms together and with tears streaming down her face, whispered against the backdrop of noise, "Shantih.  Shantih.  Shantih."  Startled, I felt my own eyes start to well, but before I could say anything, she sprang up, catlike, and was gone. 

In the silence that followed, with Amanda looking over my shoulder, I peeled away the envelope to find a solitary word:

And just like that, I understood.