New Delhi: Narratives of sexual abuse often prefer the ideal victim—respectable, blameless, non-desiring. They rely on a neat, sanitary boundary between sexual abuse and sexual pleasure. A new play questions this binary.
In Rishika Kaushik’s one-woman show, Seconds Before Coming, the unnamed protagonist revisits her past to understand how sexual grooming during her childhood continues to affect her. For 26-year-old Kaushik, who wrote, directed, and performed in the show, it began as a personal story.
“I was interested in dismantling the binary that says, what is abusive is not pleasurable and what is pleasurable is not abusive. At the root of my own story, this was an untruth. Now, after doing the play, I know that this is a common story—of pleasure and abuse and how it mixes itself. Sometimes, making attachment patterns that are lifelong,” Kaushik told ThePrint.
The writer-actor wanted to explore questions she felt no one else was comfortable uttering. And if the audience’s response is anything to go by, she was successful.
Theatre practitioner Amrita Laljee was moved to tears. “The character speaks for so many of us. And this [experience] is not separated by gender, class, caste, culture, or anything—it’s all of humanity. I just found myself viscerally connected,” she said.
On 22 March, Delhi’s Oddbird Theatre was packed with 70-odd people, old and young, seated a few feet from the performer. It was an intimate setting, with an audience that laughed, gasped, and cheered throughout the play.
In the solo piece, Kaushik takes her audience back to school, an institution that normalises misogyny and objectification. Through pranks, locker room talk, and teachers’ sexist admonitions, we’re offered the context in which sexual grooming takes place. It’s a time when a girl steps into desire and learns that she has no agency.
Shambhavi Singh, the founder of Oddbird Theatre, wanted to platform the play because she saw the conversation as real and resonant. “The piece is not meant to be preachy. It’s not saying, ‘This is what’s wrong with the world and this is how we’ll fix it.’ It says that these are the experiences, they’re painful and messy, and they should just be seen. Just have space for that,” she said.
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A literary quality
Space and time aren’t fixed entities in Seconds Before Coming. As the protagonist relives her childhood, Kaushik slips seamlessly between the child and the woman, between the present and the past. The stage design reflects this mutability. Kaushik uses a shirt to represent a paper, a pen, a cushion, a purse, and even a penis. A chair becomes a window, a notebook, and a lover.
“The narrator is in no place, so you get to see a lot of spaces in the same dialogue,” said Aditya Vikram, who teaches writing at Ashoka University. “In one instance, she’s giving a speech which is a girl’s dream and an adult’s rant at the same time. I like that sense of being in different places.”
Vikram called this mutability a ‘literary’ quality.
And this may not be an accident. The piece began as an essay Kaushik first wrote for The Third Eye’s upcoming edition on sexuality, titled ‘Pleasure and Danger’. The feminist think-tank, which operates in association with gender and education NGO Nirantar, hadn’t ever worked on a theatre project before. So when the team encouraged Kaushik to devise her essay into a play, they hadn’t imagined the transformation it would go through.
“The way Rishika assumes those characters and uses the props, I couldn’t have imagined that when I read the text. It’s her performing body, which transformed what she’s saying about pleasure and danger,” said Madhuri, lead podcast producer at The Third Eye.
Juhi Jotwani, editorial coordinator for the ‘Pleasure and Danger’ edition, found that laughter was an essential part of the play. “Humour makes these difficult conversations accessible and tangible. It allows you to touch something deeper.”
Noticeably, different parts of the audience found different jokes funny. Younger audience members, having watched Baby Reindeer and Fleabag, understood the humour in the play much more than older ones, who had a more emotional response.
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Close to the audience
For Kaushik, theatre is a “force-field of truth and magic”. Those are the two things a good play must have. But truth brings with it vulnerability, which isn’t easy for a performer to navigate.
“The audience is witnessing me—this character—and she doesn’t hide much. And the thing about being vulnerable with people is, will they hold it? Will they accept it?” Kaushik said.
The artist got her answer in the form of a standing ovation, rare in Delhi’s theatre circuit. And while the play returns to Oddbird in May and Kaushik wants many more people to see it, her team is also thinking about performing it in houses, for 10-15 people at a time.
“The theatrical elements of the play, meant for the stage, won’t work in a house. So it will shift, and it will become even closer to the audience than it is now. They will feel like we are having a conversation as friends in a bedroom.”
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)