I must have been nine or ten when my father dragged us along to watch a play whose title I could not yet pronounce: Aashadh Ka Ek Din, staged at the National School of Drama (NSD). I remember almost nothing of Mohan Rakesh’s actual plot: Kalidasa torn between the mountain girl who loved him and the throne that would later claim him. What I remember instead is smaller and stranger — the particular hush that fell over the room the moment the lights dimmed, a hush I had never once encountered inside a cinema hall, where people rustle chip packets and check their phones through the interval. I remember an actress crying real tears eight feet from where I sat, close enough that I could see her chest rise, and being seized by the confused, faintly embarrassing feeling that I was watching something not meant for me, a grief that belonged to a stranger and yet had somehow been let loose into the room. I did not have the vocabulary at nine to call this catharsis. I only knew I wanted to go back.

I have been going back, regularly, for two decades now, and the roundabout at Mandi House still fills every evening with the same kind of loitering. Rickshaw drivers wait outside the Shri Ram Centre (SRC) with the patience of men who have done this for 20 years. Students from the NSD smoke near the gate, still half in costume, kohl smudged. Inside Kamani Auditorium, an usher checks a paper ticket by torchlight while backstage a tabla is tuned, one beat at a........

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