From The Latest Issue: The Art Of Attention

It was the summer of 1995. I found him in a remote village near Jagdalpur, then part of Madhya Pradesh and now in Chhattisgarh. Khalid Tyabji, my teacher at the National School of Drama (NSD), was dancing with the villagers, jumping into the mud, rolling around, getting up and singing with joy. He saw me and simply signalled for me to join. I remember thinking, “What does this have to do with acting?”

After graduating from NSD, I felt I had only touched the surface of the craft. I wanted to understand the human body—the instrument an actor works with—more deeply. Khalid had introduced us to physical body work at NSD, where we explored every muscle, breath, movement, rhythm and tension, allowing the body to remember.

I had seen him perform “A Fool’s Song,” or “Gadha Gaan,” in which he played around 30 characters without changing his costume or make-up. Wearing only a loincloth and a fool’s cap, he moved between characters with extraordinary ease. I wanted to understand how he did it, so I asked him to teach me. He agreed. But first, I needed to earn enough money to travel with him.

I returned to Assam, where I was already popular as a stand-up comedian, and spent seven months performing with Bhramyaman Theatre, a mobile theatre company. I saved what I could, bought a second-hand Royal Enfield and eventually went looking for Khalid in central India. Madhu Ramnath, a mathematician-turned-botanist who worked closely with tribal communities, accompanied me.

It was June. The heat was severe, and the roads were difficult. Instead of resisting the discomfort, I began trying to experience it. I paid attention to the temperature, the wind on my skin, the hardness of the road, the smells and sounds, and my own breathing.

At NSD, one of my teachers, the musician Bhaskar Chandravarkar, had introduced us to the Buddhist idea of “choiceless awareness.” As I travelled, I tried to practise it by staying attentive to all five senses at once. I often failed, but repeatedly bringing my attention back to my surroundings became a practice in itself.

By the time we reached the village, our feet were covered in blisters. The first thing the villagers did was pour cold water over them. That evening, they sang songs about the strangers who had arrived. The settlement stood on a slope, so when everyone began dancing, their movements were small and measured, naturally adjusting to the terrain. I remember the darkness, the singing and millions of fireflies around us.

Following The Senses

Our journeys had very little structure. We never knew whether we would stay somewhere for three days or a month. Daylight, weather, the strain our bodies could take and how we felt about a place determined when we moved. We took smaller roads and carried two or three changes of clothes, some water and little else. At night, we sometimes slept beneath trees, with a plastic sheet and a thin dhoti between us and the ground.

Food became another way of paying attention. In Jagdalpur, we stayed with a local journalist and his family. I still remember the food his wife cooked. There was rice, chutney and perhaps a little sabji, but no dal. Yet I remember its taste clearly. I focused on the taste, the act of chewing and even the sound of it. All of that kept me in the present.

In another village, everyone ate from a common kitchen where millets were cooked in a large cauldron. There was mahua, and for the first time, I ate chakna made with crushed red ants. India contained ways of eating and living that I simply had no knowledge of.

There was humour everywhere, too. I remember two young men returning to one village, laughing away to glory. They had walked for almost a week to reach a palm tree they could tap for taadi, and spent several more days drinking what they collected. One morning, they woke to find tiger pugmarks between them. They had slept through the entire encounter and returned laughing because they had not been eaten.

Listening to them, I realised how different even the idea of having fun could be. In the city, a night of drinking might mean buying whisky from a shop or bar. For them, it meant walking for days through a jungle inhabited by tigers and bears.

What Travel Changed

The longer I stayed in these communities, the less interested I became in comparing their lives with mine. People welcomed us without knowing us. They fed us, shared what they had and allowed us into the rhythm of their days. We could leave our motorcycles with our belongings attached and return to find everything untouched.

It was an India I fell in love with, and I am still in love with it.

Those months changed the way I travelled. I became more curious about differences in food, language, behaviour, customs and rituals, and less eager to make an experience fit what I already understood. Even now, I try not to make things happen when I travel. I let them happen. I prefer to go with the flow of feelings rather than the strategic mind.

I had gone looking for a deeper understanding of acting. What I found was a way of paying closer attention to life itself.

— As told to Tenzin Chodon

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