I had started to feel resentful that my parents were imposing a limit to my freedom, that they wanted me to circumscribe my future for their sake. I was eager to come into my own in the West and make that world mine, but my parents had told me that they expected me to return to India. Aayi even feared that a white woman might ensnare me and keep me there. My parents were worried that in those three years I might decide to settle there. It would take me three weeks to reach, and then I would not be able to return to India for three years. It was an uncommon experience at the time, and certainly so in my family, where I was the first to do so. I was leaving the country and going to the West. When I reflect upon the play now, I see Puru as a personification of my own angst at the time. Though the eminent dramatist Sriranga would later write in his critique of Yayati that ‘the eight-page-long argument between Yayati and Chitralekha, who makes her entrance in the last act, feels contrived’ (Prajavani, 9 October 1961), the play was born from that argument. Never again in my life did I experience this kind of loss of control while writing a play. The characters came to life in front of me, and all I had to do was take down what they were saying to each other like I was a stenotypist. I did not feel as if I was writing a play. As I thought about it, the rest of the play began to take shape around this climax. Here, the essence of Antigone and the manner in which Alkazi’s young heroines had resisted injustice came to life again. This was the first scene that formed in front of my eyes: the confrontation between Yayati and Chitralekha.

Yayati book