You have net Apekshya a couple of times. She played Chitra in our mini-production in Lucknow – “a brave warrior” – was my companion on the train journey back from there, where, accompanied by Jigyasa and Aanshika, we played cards and My Grandma’s cat – “My grandma’s cat is an acrobatic cat” and so on, through the alphabet, remembering all the other things she was as the game progressed. She is, or rather was, Benvolio in Romeo 4 Juliet. And she is my friend.
Oh, don’t worry, I can imagine all the raised eyebrows from here, for she is, of course, just seventeen. Eighteen in a few days, but that scarcely matters. The fact that next year I will be exactly four times her age only offers me limited protection from all those eyebrows. “No fool like an old fool,” my mother used to say (I can still hear her now), and of course I am flattered that a tall, smiley, very pretty young girl would seem to enjoy my company, would agree to help me search for towelling hankies (very useful in the sweaty heat) and plasters (or Band-Aids, when she worked out what I needed), would take me to her favourite café, Flatland, where they served delicious home-made mint lemonade and cinnamon buns.
Still, seventeen, an age for which Dickens had a particular fondness. If you don’t know it, I would heartily recommend Miriam Margolyes’ Dickens’ Women’ which skewers that particular… er, peccadillo(?) most bitingly. For there have been others like Apekshya in past projects and productions; all clever, sensitive performers, and, of course, pretty: Massoumeh, Dasha, Tanya.
What marks Apekshya out is her sense of humour. I love to make people laugh, and can usually raise at least a smile. But Apekshya has a particularly subtle appreciation of when I am making a joke; in many ways, in that respect she is much like Mary, my daughter, for we too can witter on for ages, getting into more and more convoluted trains of absurdity.
And the reason she is no longer Benvolio is that she will shortly be moving, with her family, to New York. Not sure that I agree that now is a particularly propitious time for a brown-skinned immigrant to be arriving in USA, what with the very real danger of a Trump victory, but that’s not my place to say. All I can do is wish her and hers the very best of British luck, and hope we will meet again. Some sunny day.
