A recipe for laughing your sighs out

Karachi
It was an ideal opportunity for the audience to laugh their sighs out and they fully availed of the opportunity. This was the staging of the musical comedy, “East is east”, at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) auditorium on Friday evening.
However, amid the apparently lighthearted comedy, it was a profound story, a story of the cultural barriers that polarise our society, that divide society into two clear genres with values at the opposing ends of the pole and not only that but also hostile to each other.
It is the story of Jehangir Butt, a native of Azad Kashmir, who has now been living for over two decades in Karachi and has a flourishing fish-and-chips business, helped in the endeavour by his sons.
Like all males in a male chauvinist society, he maintains a double family status, has a wife back home who has to live amid highly conservative conditions, yet he is also married to an urban (and urbane) Karachi girl.
However, their home is a veritable hell because of Butt’s diehard conservative values and those of the wife and the children, who are absolutely the products of a highly cosmopolitan Karachi. Butt wants his children to conform to the purely eastern way of life with those characteristic ideas of modesty.
The wife belongs to a totally different milieu while the children who have been brought up amid an urban set-up are intent on keeping in step with the changing times. As a result of his overly overbearing stance, the children grow up into schizophrenics.
There are even scenes of revolting wife-beating and the father mercilessly beating a son and making him weep copiously.
However, it goes entirely to the credit of the two directors, Nida Butt and Sunil Shankar, that they have managed to inject so much of humour into an otherwise such a dismal scenario. Even otherwise totally unmentionable themes like circumcision have been treated in such a humorous way that they don’t sound offensive or vulgar.
There’s only one juncture at which a very vulgar term has been used in an equally rudimentary and vulgar way, with the crudest term for human defecation. That’s something the directors could have dispensed with so as not to make it sound so stomach-wrenching. Let’s hope Butt and Shankar will be more careful next time. Such language doesn’t become educated people. The absolutely original musical score by Hamza Jafri is highly commendable.