Sometimes you leave a land with an aftertaste, like mint.

It’s the feeling you get when you close your eyes and yawn in the middle of a cold street, in London, by a small shop selling records from the eighties or in Plymouth after you step out of the theatre in a warm jacket, holding bright leaflets. There is a certain silence outside, an enormous calm that surrounds you as you walk amidst cars stopping at empty traffic signals and trash bins being cleaned by men in yellow jackets.

Quite expectedly, I spent my days in England feeling rather far. Far from the crowds of Calcutta, from the screaming buses whizzing past your feet and from the inherent chaos that surrounds you at home. Yet, for a 21-year old scattered across cities, towns and even a national border (Wales), observation and contrast became a process and a pattern. Slowly I started noticing the silent rhythms that ran the country so thoroughly right in front of my eyes.

The trains moved expensively fast and I wouldn’t sleep in them (unless it was completely dark outside) lest I missed seeing something. The night I arrived in London, clad in every piece of clothing I owned, I saw snow. I woke up to it, actually, next morning.  It was a deja-vu moment, straight out of postcards  that street vendors on Calcutta’s Esplanade sell with a five-rupee price tag on them. I took my morning tea mug out in the lawn and seeing a colour that I had never seen on the Calcutta streets - white. It was beautiful and I saw a lot of snow that day. On cars, houses, parks and hills dotted with woolly lambs and stretches of shrubs with that little snow on top which says that it’s cold outside.

When the train finally arrived in Plymouth, the white sheen was gone.  Plymouth is a coastal town, with ports and ships with a lovely feel of an emerging cultural confluence. Rows of houses along large roads with a few big stores selling what you need. There were small pubs and jazz bars (advertising £10 special menus on Saturdays) full of young collegiates figuring out their lives. Sometimes, I woke up early and notices the town stirring to life - cars starting up, shops opening and bus stops gathering a crowd.

I was based at the TR2, which looked like a large warehouse but inside it was an organized, complex, sophisticated realm rarely available to theatre organizations elsewhere in the world. It housed an educational department with three very impressive rehearsal spaces, a production department which made sets, costumes and props in huge factory-like workshops. I felt important, walking around with a swipe card to open doors or working at my table with a flat screen in front and automatic lights above me.

It was difficult to imagine of a comparable place in India which could match the TR2 infrastructure. Funded by the Arts Council, TR2 not only gets financial support from the government but also profits by making the sets for the commercial shows happening in Plymouth, which then gets used again for other educational/non-commercial purposes.

I guess the possibilities in India seem fewer, not only because of the indifferent involvement of the government with theatre but also perhaps because of the way “Art” works in our country. There is a certain ruthless passion here which makes it difficult to convert the life of an artist into a mode of good systematic living. The idea of an artist having a job as an artist is a little too non-independent, too business oriented to conceive here, whereas at TR2 and at many of the other theatres that I came across, there is a language of professionalism that inhabits the stage, a procedure that you need to access for being an artist.

The procedure would also baffle me at times. During my three weeks at TR2, I would enter the building through automatic gates, eat and lounge in green rooms, use swipe cards and work at my desk all day before my rehearsals would start. It was like an office, with planners, programmers, designers, directors working and sitting next to you, in their designated desks and doing their designated jobs, nine-to-five. Theatre was a clear, systematic industry.

At the end, it was fascinating. The grandeur of a musical, the innovations of the experimental and the need to entertain in a highly competitive market made preciseness in work absolutely necessary and I watched it all - through binoculars, sitting right at the back of the Olivier theatre or at a Complicite rehearsal.  Sometimes, everything would make sense about these laws and sometimes I wondered if I was working differently under them. It was like a collective responsibility on people to run the industry better and it all seemed to work. It was still hard to make good money working in the theatre in the UK, but at least there was a system holding it all together.

I loved the travel. Moving around in trains and watching England go by. I walked down the streets in London wondering whose country it was, I saw the Welsh countryside and remembered photo studios in my locality with similar wallpapers, I met Bangalis and didn’t speak the way they did, I wondered if I could take a trip to Iceland or a two hour train ride to Paris, and in London I met fellow 21-year olds and hung out with them.

Felt one with their hatred for bad music, racism, megalomaniacs, fashion fads and found out our common love of freedom, fondness for double whiskies and cigarettes.

And then there was the show I put up. It was called Dhuno (Smoke) and I worked hard at it with a few students from high school, a little ‘old enough’ boy of thirteen, a few brilliant girls and a father! One can sometimes feel the heat of our lands. It’s a feeling you get when you close your eyes and yawn in the middle of a summer street. It’s the heat from the smoke that rises from our mouths when we light a cigarette, from our cars when we drive really fast and from our Gods when we worship them. It was this heat that I attempted to show through the 21 minutes in TR2. Probably I failed at the attempt, but I remember seeing a lot of things. I saw a caution in the actors, a curiosity and a fascinating enthusiasm.  I felt like presenting a punch as a real punch and not as scripted action, I felt like finding the similarities in the way we are, the way we see injustice, the way we rebel and I guess eventually I learnt that there is a lot to learn.

At the end it was a beautiful feeling to see so many people in one part of the world being so like others in other parts, jumping, shouting, performing, trying hard at something. It doesn’t really matter what that something is, as long as what remains is that little connection, that little experience and eventually that little aftertaste. Like thin mints.