Terminal: A Performance Where Memory Boards The Last Metro

What unfolds when a performance breathes through attic dust, ancestral riverbeds, and the last metro from Dum Dum? Sometime back, Studio Bari Kolkata hosted Terminal—a performance conceived by the performance maker, poet, translator and academic Souradeep Roy. Studio Bari Kolkata also houses fragments of installations and art exhibits of Bipajjanak Bari: Everybody has Moved and sketches from Riders of the Last Metro by artist Soumyadeep Roy. The three-storeyed building, located at the far end of a blind lane a few minutes away from Dum Dum metro station, opened its gates for the visitors to experience a performance at the intersection of a documentary, a radio play, an autobiography, and live art.

Each visitor is asked to choose a time slot of 30 minutes according to their convenience by filling up a Google Form. The host welcomes visitors with handouts that provide information about the performance and exhibitions, including their conception and details about the participants. The visitors are guided upstairs to the second floor, to navigate through the fragments of Soumyadeep Roy’s Bipajjanak Bari: Everybody has moved. It consists of sketches on different media, telling stories which Soumyadeep had unearthed while tracing his family history from 800 years ago. The stage managers—Yashodhara Chatterjee, Upasan Mukherjee, Bhargab Putatunda and Shivam Chatterjee—take turns to guide the visitors upstairs to a mezzanine floor, where they listen to a radio-play while browsing through the sketches of Soumyadeep from his series titled Riders of the Last Metro.

In the radio-play, Priyanath Ray narrates the history, significance, and gradual transformation of Dum Dum, both culturally and economically. His narration serves as a connecting thread through the performance. It links the title, the geographical and cultural significance of the location, and the personal memories of the artists. Soumyadeep mentions in the program note, “My initial response to Souradeep’s text to the performance was how similar and different our lives have been (the similarity in our names, our birthdays, the subject we both begrudgingly studied for our undergrad degrees in different colleges, our departed theatre teacher from our teenhood, Dum Dum, and the absolutely different trajectories of our respective lives) and how, for us both, the metro remains a significant marker.”

Alongside Ray’s narration, Souradeep captures the individual, candid reflections of Sreemoyee Chatterjee, Poulomi Roy, Debarpito Mitra, and Reetarshi Dutta. They look back on their involvement with the Notice Board Collective/Notice Board Theatres, tracing the group’s beginnings, the creative energy that brought them together, and its eventual fading from the cultural scene. While one narrates his relative indifference to the group’s gradual dissolution as he seems to have foreseen such a fate—given the fact that every member had to earn their living and group theatre in Kolkata was not an option for the same—another recalls being overwhelmed when Souradeep contacted her years after the group ceased to practice, to share her memories for the work. Yet another reminisces fragments of their happy memories together.

Notice Board Collective/Notice Board Theatres was a short-lived performance collective that worked from 2010-2014. They performed in Bangalore, Cuttack, Kharagpur and Kolkata. Their repertory included The Dumb Show Ebong Indrajit (an adaptation of Badal Sircar’s Ebong Indrajit and Henri Bergson’s works), F.D.I Free Dream International (Reetarshi Dutta’s original stage adaptation of a short story by Swapnamoy Chakraborty), Gheu (an adaptation of Mohit Chattopadhyay’s Kanthanalite Surjo), Excerpts from Sir’s (a selection of dramatic texts by Ramaprasad Banik) and Caryl Churchill’s The Ants, among other stage and street plays.

The visitors are invited to flip through the sketches from the series, Riders of the Last Metro which was made with pen and archival ink on paper, earth colours, gum Arabic and watercolour. Riders of the Last Metro is a series of sketches by Soumyadeep Roy, which started back in 2010/11, around the time when he was in school. It continued through his undergrad and university days and then almost all through his adult life in the city. As Soumyadeep says, “After a point, the last metro became an overarching character of its own and this series started forming retrospectively as an independent body.” The visitors encounter a unique audio-visual experience, where the ‘strangers’ in the last metro—some dejected, some drunk or dozy—share a common space with the members of the Notice Board Collective/ Notice Board Theatre, unknowing of each other’s presence, defying the continuum of time, space, and action with their personal narratives coming together.

The stage manager then guides to the attic where Souradeep awaits silently for the visitors with a camera person, directed by Ranjana Mridha. The visitors are invited and offered a seat on a cane stool to listen to an audio-clip by Souradeep himself, while he maintains a composed silence throughout, interacting only with instructions and suggestions printed on the paper and handed over to them. They listen as Souradeep speaks about his involvement with the Notice Board Collective/Notice Board Theatres. He reflects on his relationship with the members of the group and with Dum Dum, the place he comes from. As he speaks, the audience flips through Soumyadeep’s sketches. While reminiscing about his connection to Dum Dum, Souradeep shares how he introduced the area to people outside India. To those unfamiliar with it, he described Dum Dum as a place located near the airport, metro station, and a railway junction. Despite this geographical advantage, Dum Dum has never been part of Kolkata’s elite cultural circuit. Perhaps, this is due to its cartographical positioning at the fringes of Greater Kolkata. Once a hub of Bengal’s artillery operations, it has now become a centre of the booming real estate business as the city continues to expand.

The visitors are then invited to speak or refrain from doing so, while they encounter a stark silence and expressionlessness from the other end. Before climbing down to the second floor for the guided walk through the paintings, sketches and installations, the visitors get to see the arriving and departing metros in the Dum Dum metro station from Studio Bari’s terrace.

Bipajjanak Bari: Everybody has Moved is made up of broken fragments of a fleeting city. Drawing from its inspiration of the warning signs in old, disappearing houses of Kolkata, the exhibition explores the travails of its ancestors and how the different branches have moved across the subcontinent. It also looks at how the house itself mourns the loss of its immediate family members who never got to live there, and have probably moved to another realm. Soumyadeep reinscribes his personal stories of abandonment—as traced back to his ancestral roots from 800 years ago in the village Mulghar, Bangladesh along River Bhoirab—within the furniture and pieces he collected from the ‘dangerous’, dilapidated and disappearing houses of Kolkata. The visitors walk through the paddy fields, listening to anecdotes by Soumyadeep, the excitement when he first got to witness a paddy field while visiting a friend’s ancestral home, much later in life; and carefully treading along the waterbodies of Mulghar, alternatively known as Kamala Bhandar or the Garden of Earthly Delight, for its bountiful blooms of lotus. Navigating through the entwined roots of the banyan tree, one reaches the riverbanks, a king-sized bed with a wooden box of homeopathy medicines kept open on it. The bed serving as the river tells the stories of people who lived by its banks, of human relations, of blood and sweat. The medicine box has vials containing water from the river Bhairab, procured by Soumyadeep from Bangladesh, paints and drops of blood of the artist himself.

He reserves a nook in the memory of the family members—who had moved to another realm in an untimely manner—with their eyes painted on handmade Wasli that he had made with earth colours. That is usually the medium that miniature painters would use. The other 18th century tradition that it refers to is Lover's eyes, from France. As the visitors grapple with the personal losses, they are invited inside a quintessentially Bengali household where separate brooms are assigned for cleaning different areas of the house which are kept separate—a tradition usually followed quite religiously. While the visitors stand in front of the portraits of a broom, Soumyadeep narrates how a single broom served not only as his muse, but was also used for cleaning the entire house while he was working in Santiniketan, away from his home.

Terminal at Studio Bari is not just a performance, but an invitation into memory, place, and personal histories interlaced with sound, silence, sketches, and installation. Souradeep Roy and Soumyadeep Roy’s collaboration creates a deeply intimate and multisensory journey that blurs the lines between past and present, self and other, document and performance. Moving through Dum Dum’s overlooked cultural geography, the fading traces of the Notice Board Collective, and ancestral fragments from Mulghar to Kolkata, the experience is as much about remembering as it is about letting go. The performance’s structure—staggered, quiet, and solitary—allows each visitor to encounter the work uniquely. In its layered approach, Terminal offers a meditation on loss, belonging, and the everyday poetics of transit—of metros, memory, and movement.