The Day We Were Stood Up

When you take an exposition on the tribulations of the male Indian bladder in India, add a generous sprinkling of sub-graphic urinatory pantomime, toss it in an intimate little bowl, and garnish it with an oversized turban, and you have the ‘appetizer’ for Evam’s Urban Turban – stand-up comedy and improv show.

As stand-up comedies go, this local variation was the whimsical and goofy sideshow to the doggedly humorous stage acts of the professional stand-up variety. Even subversion seems flippant and offhand, all the while baiting the audience into thinking about issues during the rare moments when they weren’t asthmatically guffawing.

The show false-started with Sunil Vishnu sashaying onto stage with his ‘big afro’ hairdo, winking at the gals, slurring out his greetings – “Hey there, how’s it hangin?”- and just barely launching into a monologue about something undeniably “American-esque”, when he was rudely recalled to the wings for sporting the wrong accent, wig, and attitude…much to his puzzlement. A few seconds later, Kartik Kumar bhalle bhalle-d onto stage almost in time to a peppy Bhangra beat, in a turban large enough to crown Punjab. Thus began the “urinary tract monologue.”

Kartik outlined the woes of urination in India— the toilet dilemmas, the confusing toilet nomenclatures “loo, restroom, or kakkoos,” his toilet misadventures in a 5-star hotel ( the hotel staff ever-so-courteously suggesting that he urinate in the cloakroom!), the space constraints in toilets forcing one to adopt “yogic postures”— bemoaning the lack of a universal system to impose consistency. The audience rocked with laughter when he described another of his 5-star debladdering experiences wherein he was convinced he was defiling on a modern art installation when all he had was a glass wall to pee against. He continued with his rants against “a certain very popular multiplex whose name I refuse to divulge” and its toilet queues, unfortunate toilet bonding, not so furtive exchange of glances and notes after the separators came down, and the ingeniously placed mirrors that would afford everyone a view of the entire row of fellow urinators. He shared his deep sense of violation and revealed that his only safe haven was the far cubicle where, thankfully, he had only one human neighbour, and he was most effectively shielded from potential terror strikes. It was quite startling to learn how much the act of urination had evolved over the years and to what extent technology intervened in life processes. We came up short when he told us that “ this certain very popular multiplex whose I name I refuse to divulge” had even installed personal screens in each stall. When we balked in disbelief, he said assuringly, “They show adverts and trailers for the ultimate peeing experience… Satyamaa!”

We got our much needed respite when Shannon McDonald took over with anecdotes of her India visit and her personal memoir of her Chennai experience. She exasperatedly declared that her ‘native’ was USA, as she was tired of explaining that she was ‘from Canada and ahd travelled all over the place and only spent a little while in the USA,’ to the people who could only grasp the USA part of it. She went on to detail her observations,the stock observations of most visiting foreigners, about the seemingly inappropriate questions about money and family planning, and the curious phenomenon of the Indian headshake. She spoke of her journey to India and how in spite of and because of the immediacy and coarseness of everything here, she began to feel a sense of warmth and belonging. She concluded by saying that when she returned from her vacation in San Francisco and she stepped out into the early morning air and was greeted with a rush of smells and sounds, she had to admit to herself, and her husband, that she was finally home.

The third act, Sunil informed us, would be by one of their team— a young man of hardly 17, who had never stepped on stage— who wanted to share his thoughts with us. Rabhinder kannan spoke about the delicacy of human relations, highlighting his own relationship with his father and the one incident that invited a new perspective on it. Rabhinder urged us all to look for that spark in a relationship or around a person that could make our lives the richer for it. He spoke with surprising poise, clarity, and insight, injecting just the right amount of wry humour into his monologue to make it relevant and incisive.

Kartik Kumar came back on with a special mouth organ performance played in time to some prerecorded beats. The performance revealed another of his many talents— the ability to make the lack of talent look good. After the goofy performance that lasted about 30 seconds before Kartik declared triumphantly “You guys will buy anything, won’t you!”, he settled down to more solemn business. This time he embarked on a serious discussion on habitat loss, extinction, Darwin’s principle of the ‘survival of the fittest’, and sex ( or baking in an oven and trying not to make cakes). He covered everything from the hopeless extinction of species, vegetarianism, the unfitness of our species (because of the questions of where, when, and how to bake, plaguing us), the enigma of the “birds and bees, ” and the evolutionary superiority of dogs, particularly pugs. In interweaving these facts, Kartik established a critical, if hitherto unnoticed, insight. In pledging their allegiance to humans (the current ruling party) as man’s best friend (no accident that!), dogs had actually secured ascendancy. He concluded by portending ominously that these mean cake-making-machines would soon become the masters of the world, dooming the human race to inevitable extinction

Evam’s Urban Turban premiered in Bangalore and was performed at Alliance Francaise, Chennai for two days. The shows were all improvised and therefore, Evam claimed, no 2 shows were alike.

While the performance was no gourmet dinner, it was a fine meal for the street food lovers among us. I, for one, definitely wouldn’t mind going back for seconds.

(Swathi)