Today was an important day. It was the day of Background Work. Isha and I had kept today – Wednesday, the 22nd of April – for this reason itself. No rehearsals, no practices were scheduled. Today, we were going to do the core work – and we planned to complete it.

There was a lot to be done. Several unmade props written in red ink on our list had begun to incessantly shriek at us from the paper; our ginormous and ridiculously detailed list of costume ideas wanted verification; 3-4 lengthy word documents had started to ask if they were ever going to be written; banners, important drawings and three different stage set ups for 8 scenes did not seem to be on paper yet; the lights and sounds were waiting to be explained to the kind volunteer moms whom we had recently roped into the production process.

Did I mention that there was a lot to be done?

But we were not worried. We knew that we were capable to doing all of it. Although our previous productions had all stretched for a minimum of 2 months (which is a lot of time to get things done properly), we knew that where there is a will, there is a way.

And there was no shortage of will.

Isha came over at 12:30 in the afternoon, and we got down to work immediately. While she worked on the stage set-up diagrams, I worked on the scarecrow’s costume. I had asked our kind household helper (Manju-akaa) to gather some hay from her village the previous day. She had gotten a big bag back for us to use. I stuck and sewed and fixed the hay onto the straw hat, the striped button down and the patched pants (the “patches” on the pants were painted on by us). After that I carved out an axe from a thick thermocol sheet and painted it. We broke for a quick lunch and then started the tedious work of recording and logging. The footage we had of previous practices helped us tremendously. It’s interesting – we found it hard to recall what we had done barely a week ago. We had to use references and little memories to piece our recollections together. It can be inferred from that 1 and ½ hour sitting that we had come a long way from the situation a week ago. Truly, work was happening at the speed of light. We had accomplished a lot!

At 3:30pm, we crossed the big task of logging off our list. We then split the work again: I worked on the documents while Isha made detailed and seft explanatory guides for the volunteer moms and made hard copies of our important lists – after all, you can’t entirely rely on soft copies, now can you? I then finished off a couple more costumes before we left for a few houses – Meera aunty’s house to explain the light system, Ganeev’s house for an individual practice, and Rashi’s house for checking out some props.

At 6pm, we rechecked the massive list and with great joy (and a tad bit of relief) crossed out a bunch of things. Ah, the lists had grown so, so much smaller. What was left in most of them was now only what had to be done on the days of the shows.