IT was at some point during the college years that one brushed against the world of theatre. This started when I was one of the half-a-dozen students who contorted and cavorted around a tall umbrella stand in Mohan Rakesh’s play, ‘Chhatriyan’ (Umbrellas). The one-act play was prepared by our college and was carried to the youth festival hosted at GHG Khalsa College at Gurusar Sadhar, near Ludhiana. The play, well, managed to get by and that was all thanks to the passionate professor-directors that we had and the excellent lead actor who went on to join the Army.The start of that journey was also theatrical. At the crack of dawn, those of us who stayed in the hostel lined up and waited to be picked up by the professors. Never before and since have I seen so much packed into a single auto-rickshaw. Actors, professors, personal belongings, umbrellas, and a huge metal umbrella stand arrived at the bus stand, disgorging and continuing to disgorge humans and assorted objects, much to the amusement of others waiting for their buses.This was followed by the inevitable argument over how much had been settled and how much had to be paid to the auto-rickshaw driver. That took some doing. Then, we were off. As far as the rest of the day and what followed goes, my memory has selectively retained bits and tossed out the rest. To use a phrase that seems to crop up in every meeting, my ‘key takeaway’ from that moment was the realisation that I enjoyed theatre. To use a phrase my golfing friends bandy about: ‘The bug had bitten.’As that bug continued chomping, one did the rounds between mono-acts and regular plays. There was a moment when one was even offered a film role. That moment passed, as did several others. Without the glaze of celluloid, one of those passing moments was when the aforesaid passionate professors introduced us to the late Gurcharan Singh Channi. He was already well known but was yet to reach the top of the ladder with his remarkable street plays. While it was now time for me to leave Chandigarh, some of the other freshly minted thespians became a part of Channi’s team.Then I was back in the hills. The club here is what the West would call a ‘gentleman’s club’. However, one of its mandates that goes back to the 19th century is that it remains theatre-focused. This is also what gives the institution its core identity. I was introduced to Dr KC Khanna, a distinguished academic (and, incidentally, father of the artist Krishen Khanna). He was preparing to stage that iconic play, ‘Dial M for Murder’. And the next thing I knew, I was a part of the cast.Having just inched one’s way out of the teens, one got around pretending to be as suave and world-weary as only an ‘early-twentier’ can. That moment also passed. There have been dozens of productions since then — some in English, some in Hindi and even the occasional workshop for children. Some have been serious, some farcical, some vacuous.Each play has had its moments — a few sad or disappointing, but most have been delightfully happy. Here, one has also seen the unfolding of numerous backstage dramas and often, how hidden traits of a person (sometimes unpleasant) suddenly come to the fore. There was a time when I was caught up in something and was not a part of the regular play. Two days before the final production, the lead actor threw a tantrum (even amateurs have those) and walked out. I was pulled out of the woodwork and with cheat-slips hidden all over the stage, and the able assistance of the prompters, managed to fill in.Recently, a cat upstaged the players at an open-air theatre in Izmir, Turkey, when it wandered on to the stage during the tragic and final scene of a production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by the Imperial Russian Ballet Company. The cat pawed at the hair of the ‘dead’ Romeo (Romeow?). Juliet had to come to the rescue by dragging the ‘body’ away from all this feline attention.Here, in Shimla, in a homespun amateur theatre production, we had our own little moment of being upstaged.The layout of Shimla’s enchanting Gaiety Theatre is such that only a couple of doors stand between the stage and the main thoroughfare, the Mall. We were in the middle of a tense scene and had a hall packed with an enthusiastic audience — with more than a few VVIPs added for good measure. A family, obviously tourists, decided to open the doors and saunter in. Someone had forgotten to bolt the outer door. While we stared, stunned, with all lines and cues lost, the husband, wife and their two children examined us, took a look at the audience, examined us again to fathom if we were real and ambled off just as casually as they had wandered in.The audience was in splits and the laughter continued while we grappled with a disrupted scene of seriousness.— The writer is an author based in Shimla