The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman's Memoirs by Urmila Pawar

Author:Urmila Pawar [Pawar, Urmila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT008000, Literary Criticism/Asian/General, History/Asia/India &#38, HIS017000, South Asia
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-05-29T07:00:00+00:00

When I was in the ninth standard, we had a teacher called Vasantrao Deshpande who decided to stage a one-act play called Kalalavya Kandyachi Kahani (The tale of the onion that poisoned people’s minds) for the interschool one-act play competitions. The story is simple. A princess once found an onion among the fruits. Out of curiosity, she started peeling it, which made her eyes water. The tears simply would not stop. The king made a public announcement that the man who made her laugh would receive half his kingdom. So many people came and gave it a try and finally the princess did laugh. The subject was amusing enough for children.

At that time I was quite a hefty girl. My elder sister, who was thin as a straw, used to say, “Don’t stand next to me! You will break my bones if you accidentally fall on me!” The teacher thought that I looked funny enough for the role of the king. I had no stage fright, as I regularly participated in many programs. The teacher also knew that fellow students found my mimicry of other teachers quite entertaining. For the role of the king’s cook, he chose a girl who was the daughter of our English teacher, Nene, who did not like this and insisted that his daughter be made the king, which Deshpande did not accept. We did lots of rehearsals and performed well in competitions but did not win any prize, but I got at least one for my performance. For quite a long time, the water seller named Aagashe, near Lata Talkies, and some people would call out, when they saw me passing by, “So your royal highness, how are you?” People remembered my role for a long time.

But the impact of the play was not limited only to this. I was asked to speak in a low-pitched loud voice while doing the role of the king for comic effect. So my voice would get hoarse. Then I would chew herbal medicines like kankol and khadi sakhar. This story had sort of a subplot. Deshpande, our teacher, had fallen in love with a doctor in the town called Tara Lubri. Madam used to come to the rehearsals occasionally. She had a very distinctive personality. She looked like a beautiful sculpture carved out of marble by an accomplished artist. She would be gracefully dressed in a white nine-yard sari and a well-fitting blouse that covered her back and bosom well and yet managed to highlight her figure. The pleats of her tightly draped sari fell gracefully over her feet, bobbing up and down when she walked. She always walked straight with her head held high. One end of her pallav would be tightly wound around her waist, and sometimes she would just wind it around the little finger of her left hand. She wore a small wristwatch and a small white purse swung from her wrist. Her hair was tied in a neat bun at the nape of her neck.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.