Are the “good old days” always as great as we remember them? Central to nostalgia is a cognitive bias that blurs all the difficulties and disappointments that may have been part of the original reality. It is, as said often, looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. In his collection of essays The Necropolis Trilogy, the playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar revisits his past, but it is not a rosy recollection.
Elkunchwar’s lens moves in and out of his childhood and youth, reflecting on who and how the author was in those days. But it is neither a tell-all autobiography nor a memoir with methodically selected episodes: with a stream-of-consciousness flow, it adds moments as it moves along. The poetic quality of the writing, the picturesque details, the stunning organisation of fact and imagination make these essays haunting.
Meanings do not come to you instantly though. Elkunchwar does not arrange his life neatly into blocks to make the experience easy for the reader. Conceived as a monologue with the self, the essays encounter emotions and betrayals through the narrated incidents.
It recognises invisible cruelties, changing social structures, and urban chaos but also flows with a seeming lightness of being. Interspersed with the playful and the poetic, the entire work moves through philosophical questions of lightness and weight. In her introduction to the book, theatre director Amal Allana says: “Hauntingly beautiful like the fragment of a melody that persistently rep.