I had mixed feelings. I was deeply stirred by its melodrama and use of Marathi but I also felt it was a tearjerker. (Read a related post on Ekach Pyala here.)
Play's protagonist Sindhu सिन्धु made a deep impression on me. But I wasn't attracted to her. I thought she was like many middle-class, largely Brahmin, women I came across in Miraj.
There was one very fair skinned, twenty plus, sharp-featured, five-yard saree-wearing Chitpavan Brahmin woman who passed by our house almost every day.
Wherever, any time of the day, she saw cow dung lying on a street, she stopped in her tracks, lifted it in her right palm, positioned that palm over her right shoulder, dung facing sky, and carried it to her house.
I thought Gadkari's Sindhu was like her except the length of saree as Sindhu surely wore nine-yard one.
How wrong I was!
I realised it when I read M. V. Dhond's (म. वा. धोंड) 'Chandra Chavathicha', 1987 (चंद्र चवथिचा; In English- "Fourth Day Moon").
Dhond uncovers, what Gadkari doesn't do overtly, attractiveness of Gadkari's Sindhu.
For instance after a long separation from her husband Sudhakar, Sindhu, whose marriage is not that old, is looking forward to mating with him. She is humming a suggestive song to herself.
In short: Sex is on her mind.
Dhond reasons that the 'fourth day' also implies the last day of a woman's monthly menstruation cycle, when having suffered variously, including even lack of bath, on account of prevailing social customs, women looked forward to a reunion with their husbands.
I was fascinated by this. Now, Sindhu started to look like many attractive middle-aged married women one comes across.
It reminded me of Hitchcock's presentation of his blondes Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren.
Why?
Hitchcock: You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We're after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they're in the bedroom.
Truffaut: What intrigues you is the paradox between the inner fire and the cool surface.
Hitchcock: Definitely...Do you know why? Because sex should not be advertised...because without the element of surprise the scenes become meaningless. There's no possibility to discover sex.
[Interview: Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Tuffaut (Aug/1962)]
Kim Novak, "Vertigo"
Artist: Raja Ravi Varma, "Lady in the Moon Light"
Is she Gadkari's Sindhu? And is that the fourth day moon?