যে জানলাগুলোর আকাশ ছিল, কি আজ আমাদের আরশিনগর?

- Saimonti

বাড়ির কাছে আরশী নগর

সেথা পড়শী বসত করে,

"কি রে খেলতে আসবি না?”

Can you imagine this picture? The sun, now a mushy orange yolk, has changed its hue, and the summer feels breezy and so full of life. Your friends are waiting while you plead with your mother to let you go play with them, carefully lying that you had the best afternoon nap of your life and won’t fall asleep in the evening while studying. Sounds familiar, right? That entire picture was this drama, “Je Janlagulor Akash Chilo”, for you. It was the “Arshinagar”, or mirror land, that showed us something we lost forever.

The window that led you to your friends, the window that spoke a hundred dreams to you, the window that was your entire childhood — do you remember that window now? I’ve been given this intimidating task of reviewing this drama, but I cannot comprehend how one reviews a feeling, a nostalgia that has been well-kept on the ceilings of my memory. How do I critique it? I won’t even try to analyze it; I’ll confess that from the very beginning. Instead, I’ll take you through the journey of what it made me feel.

But first things first, let’s get the technicalities out of the way before we set foot to travel. “Je Janlagulor Akash Chilo” is a drama presented by the theatre group Iccheymoto, written by Rahul Arunoday Banerjee and directed by Sourav Palodhi. There’s no other way to describe the stage setting except to say that it was built to be a memory land of the ‘90s. The music felt heavy with the tune of nostalgia, and the actors — they weren’t acting. It felt like they were just time-traveling to a place they had already lived.

I’m not a ‘90s kid; I have only ever lived through that time in books and movies. However, whatever the late ‘90s built, the early 2000s were always at the receiving end of their remnants. The sepia-themed stage, the lighting that felt like a distant memory — Palodhi knew how to tug at the heartstrings of the audience. If we consider the storyline of JJAC, there wasn’t exactly a plot to begin with. The drama wanted to document an era that is now lost, something we can only visit when we reminisce, something which feels like your mother’s sweet smell clinging to her home clothes.

JJAC is a drama that centres around four friends, four humans who were friends since time immemorial. All their firsts revolve around each other, their lives so deeply intertwined that one couldn’t exist without the other. What Gen Z terms as “homies”, that’s probably their definition as well. However, the sweetness was short-lived, before society started interfering, and before their own ideologies tore them apart.

All throughout this play, I hoped the four would come and sit in our seats to watch their lives unravel and complicate, and realize that all along it was just their desperation to not lose touch, to not be alone. Their search for belonging led them to ends that didn’t connect. The play does not have a linear timeline either. It plays back and forth, and importantly, through the memories of these four friends. Remember the times when you would secretly hope that the light would go out in the evening so you wouldn’t have to study? Or the times when you would sneakily glance at your childhood crush, or the first time you ever got drunk with your friends? Are the memories faded or does it feel like a water-colored picture? Somewhere along the way, through these seemingly insignificant acts, you one day realize that they were in fact not insignificant at all, and maybe they were the most significant points all along. The drama through its non-linear narrative also portrayed a society that was tumultuous, and uncertain and made an important social commentary on how important it is to not drift along the tide of uncertainty and keep the loved ones close when the materialistic world outside seems too alluring to be true.  Here, I’ve summarized the entire drama for you.

We have all had a Buban, a Soma Di, a Tubai Da, and a Tatin in our lives. There was a Tatin who so desperately wished to connect the four, a Soma Di who vehemently lived through her ideologies, a Buban so desperately having his walls high, and lastly, a Tubai Da, the supposedly practical one who led a practical life. All the incidents that formed this play were specifically curated in a way that speaks to all of us—the happiness, the pain, the anger, and again, that desperate sense of belonging. The end would make you wonder if you should go call that one person, or that group, and ask how they are and what nonsense they’re up to, how their life is, and if it matches those daydreams they escaped to when classes got boring. But then again, you would think we are all meant to grow apart — that’s part of this journey — and believe that in the end, we would all meet because that’s how the universe works.  

One might wonder why I referred to the verses of Lalon at the very beginning of this article. It was simply because JJAC felt like a baul song. Your life starts out simple; you begin as a blank canvas, but once the paint strokes touch the white surface, only the outline of the canvas remains. You become someone entirely new; you become a painting. The search for the Porshee is like the search for the beginning, when the canvas was blank, when life had infinite directions to steer towards. And in this drama, the porshee, or the neighbor, or the God, was the friendship. And Arshinagar? Their past, their childhood—something they could never return to, but something that remained nonetheless...