![]() Tendulkar accepted violence as an inexorable fact of life. THE VULTURES SUMMARY VIJAY TENDULKAR CRACKEDA stint in journalism heightened his sense of immediate, unvarnished reality, while the rambles at night made him witness desperate moments a sex worker who plied her trade with a child under the cot, a sudden brawl where he saw a man decapitated by a cracked liquor bottle. ![]() Two uncles turned mad, and he found his missing brother, an alcoholic, dead in a ditch. ![]() ![]() I go to Pune to spend time with her, but become uncomfortable after some time.Īs a small-time publisher and theatre aficionado, Tendulkar senior provided a literary ambience at home, but the young Vijay grew up in a Bombay (Mumbai) chawl where life was sliced in the raw every day. She is always affectionate to me, as if mentally she sees herself as my mother now. She lives in an old womens institution now, quietly claims she is happy where she is, doesnt want to borrow the problems of our families she says she is better off with the problems of the women around her. And that too a girl of plain looks with no special attributes. She grew up with an inferiority complex at not being a boy. She did not have looks, nor the kind of grooming to involve a man. My father, with his principle of not making an exhibition piece of his daughter to marry her off, could not see her married. They show how his feelings for his nearest and dearest could be complex, even disturbing.Ī friend felt those shadows when Tendulkar mused in 1997: For months together I forget I had my parents in my life but when it comes to me, the memory, the love I received at the cost of my sister I yearn to have the two by my side, force-feeding me (as they did when I was sick in childhood) and I crying my heart out. Years later, he was to write one of his most moving prose tracts about his father, and another about his sister. Born to doting lower middle-class parents, favourite child Vijay grew up with a mute visual of his father threatening his mother. No one could accuse Tendulkar for shying away from unpalatable, even unutterable, truths. Where else could the girl go? Was he cynical? No, I just refuse to pamper myself with illusions. People dont like to acknowledge that kind of matter-of-fact reality. You knew just why he enjoyed film-maker Ritwik Ghataks quip, The audience flopped, not my film!, when he explained that Baby did not make drama of cruelty, it just showed the way people lived. He nevertheless opened up when questioned about his failures. Known for his reticence about his work, Tendulkar rarely watched his plays being performed. When a translator abandoned Baby half way as gruesome, Tendulkar asked, You want to go through life with blinkers on? Returning to his mohalla after serving prison sentence, the man finds his sister telling him not to offend the rapist she is now living with him. Is this awareness of humiliation why, among 30 full-length plays written over four decades, Tendulkar had a special affection for his unsuccessful Baby? A brother reacts to the rape of his sister by attacking the perpetrator, the local dada. At least, that is what fellow playwright Girish Karnad declared and added, No one understood the sense of humiliation as Vijay Tendulkar did. The man was acknowledged by three generations of admirers even by some adversaries as Indias finest playwright. At this rate Id best open my own pharmacy, he said. All kinds of infections develop a fascination for me, wont leave me once they get in. But his mind remained razor sharp through the last decade of physical debilitation. He suffered from the rare muscular disease myasthenia gravis about which he joked, I thought only film stars got it. With a downslide in health for months, much of the time spent in hospital, he slipped into a coma before the end came on May 19. The wish may not have come true for the writer, Vijay Tendulkar. ![]() Later he wrote to a friend, I want to live the moment of my death and die as I feel it in my body. Vijay Tendulkar (1928-2008), acknowledged as modern Indias finest playwright, never shied away from unpalatable, even unutterable, truths.ĭeath is the most interesting happening in life, because no one quite knows what it means to undergo the experience, he once said. ![]()
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