Roundabout | They speak as their lips are free and their tongues are their own

She was just a nine-year-old girl living with her parents in government accommodation in Delhi’s Sujan Singh Park post ‘partition’. So she did her first piece of writing, a story titled, “You Have to Learn to Make Friends” for the children’s section of “Shankar’s Weekly”. Vicky Ahuja brings ‘Sardarji’ alive in a one-actor play All lit fests have their share of performing arts and rightly too, for all words and no play make for dull festivity. But the piece de-resistance at the KSLF was the one-actor enactment of the classic story by the great writer-filmmaker, late Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, titled “Sardarji” which broke the fallacy of communalism; in which a Sikh, uprooted from west Punjab, gives up his life to save a Muslim neighbour from Uttar Pradesh who realises his own prejudice. Well-known film and stage actor Vicky Ahuja enacted this gem of a short story like never before to select audiences in two shows and the second generation of those who suffered in the great divide broke into cathartic tears.