Another Eventful Day in Nizamabad

After our early rise to celebrate Freya’s arrival on the front page of the nationwide Hindu newspaper, we got ready to go to the theatre. We had a lovely light breakfast – Sandeep’s mum is so worried about our eating – she feels we don’t like her cooking because she feels that we are hardly eating anything. She does not speak English so it is very hard to convey to her that we love every bit of her cooking, but that we just can’t eat a kilo of each item on her extensive menu. We feel permanently full and often stuffed to be precise! A normal lunch consist of a starter of at least 2 chappatis with 2-3 vegetable curries, followed by biryani, dhal, rasam (pepper water) and white rice. The last part of the meal is more of their beautiful long grained white rice with homemade curd (yogurt), and 1-2 breads stuffed with jaggery as a sweet. It is a struggle to get though all this twice a day, and the feeding team bent on stuffing us, is ready to serve us seconds and thirds at any time, which we constantly have to refuse. I wish I was really starved, so I could eat like a glutton and make them all really happy, but alas, I feel heavier and fuller than ever! I would like to take this opportunity to thank Graham Brown for his amazing tip – giving us the phrase charlu which means no more in Telugu – I have now had plenty of practise at using this life-saving phase.

From Left: Freya, Sandeep’s Father, Sandeep’s Acting Guru, Sandeep & Sandeep’s Sister

At present in Nizamabad is hosting a statewide theatre competition, with select plays being performed. They are shown live on television each day of the festival. Sandeep’s drama teacher, who we saw in action recently in a new Telugu movie, was directing a play, and he insisted that we all come to see it. So we headed for the freshly renovated auditorium, and settled in, with much attention given to us – they must hardly ever see foreigners here. Freya’s patience with all this fuss being made over us was starting to wane – so she puts on a grumpy face and tries to disappear. The play was just amazing. Although the whole thing was in Telugu, the acting and drama of any situation made it incredibly interesting to watch. The production values were great, the costumes and stage sets beautiful and tasteful, and it was clear that this was not ordinary small town production. All the actors were very well known in their own right (and some of them from the relatively large Telugu movie industry), and as much of the play was in verse, they also sing beautifully. The villain had the classic evil laugh and he was quite a character to watch. At one point in the performance a young movie star arrived in the auditorium, and there was much commotion at the door, where all his followers were congregating. It was becoming quite noisy, and so they simply asked this young mega star and his minders to leave, as it was disturbing the audience too much. In the finale of the play the bright blue colored goddess Kali, who kills all the demons, and has a belt of skulls around her waist and her tongue hanging out, came in and danced around swallowing a lit candle in her mouth. Most of the rest of the play was much more subtle in its action, but this finale was to celebrate the final victory of good over evil, and the power of forgiveness.

After the play finished, we made our way to meet the director, but we were completely swarmed by onlookers. Everyone asked us where we were from and wanted to take photos with us. Somehow Caspar and I lost sight of Guy, Freya and Sandeep, and then a young man showed us the way to the green room, where we met all the actors, and had photos taken with them, and of course we thanked them and wished them all well. It was packed with people in there, and it was a relief to get out into the open. We finally found the rest of our team on the verandah, where Guy and Freya were in the middle of a TV interview. They wanted to hear our opinion on the play we just saw and how it was different to theatre in Australia. So maybe we might be on television….I hope we gave sensible informative answers. Actually as we arrived at the sari shop afterwards (on the way the kids and Sandeep squeezed in two ice-creams each at the ice-cream parlour) we met a couple of friends who said they had seen us on TV watching the play. They said that in the breaks between the acts they had filmed us watching the play. Freya was really not impressed by all this attention, so I told her to thank her lucky stars that she is not a really famous person!

We have just had a lovely light lunch of vegetable biryani with raita and pickle (only), and Sandeep is going to have a haircut, teach Freya a little dance, while Guy is waiting for his new gold ring to be delivered…and then we drive back to Hyderabad, after a most homely and relaxing stay with Sandeep’s lovely family.