KARACHI: Pir Acche Aur Mir Baqar Ali, a short 40-minute playlet that will stay with you for 40 years or even more, performed at the Pakistan Theatre Festival’s second last day on Saturday night, is a sensitive take on William Shakespeare’s poem ‘The Seven Ages of Man’.

Its writer, senior journalist Peerzada Salman, has also performed and given direction to the play, which has all been done in very classy and artistic manner.

The playlet may have many characters but you don’t see them. You only hear about them through the character of Hindustan’s famous storyteller Mir Baqar Ali, played by Khizer Salman, resting on a takht while Peerzada himself intervenes to assist the narration in order to interpret or explain certain things in his own casual way.

Hence there are only two men on the stage separated by a big electronic screen where you can see the pen sketches by artist S.M. Raza of the various stages, rather milestones, in the life of Pir Acche.

Mir Baqar Ali has the spotlight when he speaks, and when he stops, there is Peerzada standing in lights to fill you in on the details. Then when he has finished talking, he breaks the biggest rule of stage play by turning his back to his audience until it is his turn to speak again.

This seesaw of this prose and poetry, monologue as they call it, opens with Pir Acche as a child and then as a youth ready to embrace life in his hometown of Panipat. He has studied till Matric. It is the final days of British rule. Pir Acche has a lot to look forward to. At 17, he falls in love with a 12-year-old and asks his mother to take his proposal of marriage to her parents. He is married to her at 18. She is only 13 then, which Peerzada cuts in to explain, was quite normal and acceptable in those days.

Peerzada also educates on the matter of conflict in storytelling. “There is no story without conflict in the plot,” he explains. “Everything cannot be all good and smooth running in a story.” And so you have the first conflict when after giving him three children in nine years, Pir Acche’s young wife succumbs to lung cancer, which went undiagnosed for quite a while until it was too late.

Not wanting to be burdened with the caring of his young children, the widowed Pir Acche leaves them in the care of an uncle, Mamoo Kabeer. The uncle loves the children dearly but he also loves opium.

“You can do what you want to do with your life. But children are innocent. They should be allowed to enjoy their childhood,” Peerzada explains here.

Another era begins. India is breaking up into two. When the bad times reach Panipat, Pir Acche sets foot for Delhi and then Lahore and Karachi, with a second wife and their three kids. On their way they are met with trouble but Pir Acche Baqar fights it off by scaring away the attackers with the only two bullets in his pistol, a dowry gift of his first wife.

Meanwhile, his three children whom he had left with Mamoo Kabeer also reached Karachi though Pir Acche has not met them in years. Sometimes, he does think about them though. There are feelings of guilt of not having done justice with them or the land of his birth by leaving it.

In Karachi, he lives at Burnes Road. Time ticks his children grow up. Pir Acche is growing old. He is a grandfather. The time and love he couldn’t give to his children, he now has for his grandchildren. He is quite old now. The pen sketches on the electronic screen shows a bald man with no teeth. He keeps unwell and says farewell to this world at the age of 84.

Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2023