Including Zayde, by Sanjay Kumar, New Delhi

Born, raised, and currently residing in New Delhi, Sanjay sees himself as one who has been acting to act and performing to perform.

Editor’s note: While this story is told in his own voice, the author has also created a fictional character linking COVID-19 to the myriad plagues that hit Europe from the 14th to the 17th century.

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He is on the margins, I have to get Zayde in. 

Zayde, I wonder why his parents called him that? It meant ‘grandfather’ in Hebrew and made him the butt of ridicule all his life. 

Why not a default name, like John, or like mine, Sanjay? As a practitioner of activist theater, I knew the danger of having that recognizable a name, in repressive times.

The times of the plague, as it hit London in September 1592. A peripheral actor in Lord Strange’s Men, Zayde had last performed in the newly opened Rose Theater. They paid him little, but he enjoyed doing those women’s roles. And he loved the dressing room, loved ogling the men as they undressed and dressed, especially the guy who played Tamburlaine. 

I miss playing in my theatre.

He lost his contract with Lord Strange. March riots, September plague, theaters remain shut. Bitter riots and bitter suppression. These poor soldiers, young lads really, had been called from their villages to fight the Spanish Armada. The Armada was defeated, four years ago. And by now, England sailed supreme on the seas. These migrants had no purpose. Just look at their gumption– they stood in various parts of the city seeking food and work. They had to be dealt with, firmly. And then plague struck. The worst pandemic to date, in London. It kept getting worse, as people jostled each other in search of food and rest, making the infection even more infectious. 

New Delhi, Chhattarpur, returning from safe rehearsals: hordes of migrants, hungry and distressed, divested of livelihood, no masks or social distancing. Homeward bound. 

Pushed to the ground, Zayde felt the first kick in his ribs. 

“You are not one of us. You are not aligned to those in power. You don’t belong here.” 

Though he was born in London and had spent all his life there, Zayde had to acknowledge that truth. Those Draconian Acts made him a stranger in his own land. The dreaded “Acte for the punishment of Vagabondes,” (1572), given new teeth in times of distress, made not-belonging performers like him “vagabonds and masterless men and hence subject to arrest and imprisonment.”

A medley of blows, and Zayde is hurt. 

“He acts. Promotes the work of the devil. A traitor to his God and his nation. Just kill him,” they say. 

The religious bigot, the most dangerous. 

Would the new Citizenship Acts of the mainstreaming government divest me of my citizenship? My parents were from Pakistan, but I am not the other religion; yet I am of the other dispensation, committedly against the Indian government’s right wing religious supremacism. I see that face- shoot the pigs. (Goli maro Salo ko

Dirty, sweaty hands pick Zayde up, what will they do to him? 

I have to get Zayde in.

I stood in front of the mirror, running the brush through my hair in a way that would hide the absence of the same commodity. A smile, rare these days, as I peered at the screen of my laptop. Getting Zayde’s story in would make relevant my teaching of Elizabethan theatre to my second year students.

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(This story was prepared for an “Imagine Another World” online storytelling workshop held October 16, 2020.)

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