The motives that underlie the reason for secrecy may be many: a simple jest, an attempt to conceal one’s guilt, an escape mechanism, or an attempt to wield power over another. Indeed, an inherent ambivalence marks the idea of secrecy: it can be enabling in warding off disagreeable consequences while it may also be the reason for a damaging trail of events. Quite often it is not so much the secret per se as the threat of disclosure that acts as a perpetually dangling sword of Damocles. Consequently, an act of secrecy can be the fertile genesis of much dramatic suspense and narrative excitement. This is what makes the trope of secrecy a favourite among writers who use it to make the narrative gripping. In the literary domain an implied textual meaning in the form of irony, allusion, allegory or any other form of oblique reference belongs to the category of secrecy. Narrative information in certain texts is withheld and finally revealed in such a manner as to pique the reader’s interest and curiosity. In his essay “Secrets and Narrative Sequence” Frank Kermode states that “Secrets … are at odds with sequence … and one way we can find the secret is to look out for evidence of suppression which will sometimes tell us where the suppressed secret is located” (87-88). This is very pertinent to Mahesh Dattani’s play Tara, I engage with in this paper. It seeks to explore how the trope of secrecy has been used to fuel the narrative along various registers: thematic, symbolic and also in respect to the delineation of characters. The play derives its narrative energies from a “skeleton-in-a-closet” whose inevitable exposure not only keeps our interest riveted but also opens up diverse discursive domains of interpretation. 

Mahesh Dattani uses naturalistic theatre to present the difficulties and problems faced by the urban Indian bourgeoisie. His focus is the common man and his plays engage with the themes of gender identity, homosexuality and family politics. He specialises in exposing the undercurrents of “normal” family. As a dramatist, Dattani exploits the possibilities that the stage offers to the fullest. The division of the stage into different levels enables him to not only move seamlessly between the past and present, but to also cut across the boundaries of time and space. Such a technique, coupled with the effective use of music and lighting, impart an almost cinematic quality to his plays. 

His play Tara revolves around the fate of two conjoined twins, Tara and Chandan, and follows their physical and emotional separation. Though the major thematic concerns of the play are gender discrimination, notions of normality and abnormality, and family conflict, the action of the play hinges on the revelation of a dark family secret. Tara attempts to illustrate the roles played by secrecy in the fostering as well as the destruction of human relationships. These include the moral and psychological consequences of the need to conceal devastating information and the ways by which secrets are hidden and penetrated.

In Tara, Dattani focuses his gaze on a dysfunctional family to lay bare the injustices meted out to the Indian girl child. The older child Dan, or Chandan, is the narrator and is writing a play about his twin sister, Tara. The narration is non-linear, as the play moves back and forth in time. The stage is divided into three different levels which allows for a fluidity of movement. Dan’s level, representing a London bedsitter, is the only level set in real time. The highest level, that is Dr Thakkar’s level is imagined, and the level of the Patel household, which is the lowest, is remembered. The dramatic structure of the play and the different stage levels afford the audience an aerial perspective of the whole action. “The schematization of spaces and the use of levels and areas laid by lighting is engineered in such a manner that the characters seem to be in the grip of something larger than themselves.” (Mathur 168) 

As the play opens, Dan soliloquises about his anguish caused by past memories, which he is trying to channelise into a play named “Twinkle Tara”. He lives in London mainly to create a distance between himself and his past: “Locking myself in a bedsitter in a seedy suburb of London, thousands of miles from home hasn’t put enough distance between us.” (Dattani 323). The action then shifts to the level of the Patel household, that is Dan’s past, and we immediately sense discord in the family. There is an argument between the parents of the twins, Patel and his wife Bharati, over the latter’s father. We are introduced to Tara and Chandan who seem to harbour different ambitions but sadly, it looks like neither of the children will be allowed the freedom to pursue these ambitions. Then there is a disturbing reference made to Bharati’s mental health. There is a break in the action here and we go back to Dan’s level. Dan is apparently very disturbed with the recollection and he jerks as if woken from a nightmare. He then tries to concentrate on his writing, and thinks of Tara thus:

She never got a fair deal. Not even from nature. Neither of us did. Maybe God never wanted us to be separated. Destiny desires strange things. We were meant to die and our mortal remains preserved in formaldehyde for  future generations to study. (330)

At this point in the play, we cannot make sense of Dan’s words. It is only later, after the revelation of the secret, that we get to understand its full significance. The friction between Patel and Bharati, and Bharati’s deteriorating mental health, both of which are introduced right at the beginning, find an explanation only after the disclosure. Dattani withholds information, thereby stimulating the inquisitiveness of the reader. The one time the play openly hints at a secret is when Bharati has a fight with Patel over the choice of a donor for Tara’s kidney transplant. When Bharati expresses her wish to donate her kidney to her daughter, Patel is adamant that he will never allow that. It is at this point that Bharati threatens to disclose a dark secret.

                    BHARATI: I will tell her.

                    Patel stops.

                    I will tell them everything.

                    Patel goes to her and slaps her. The moment she recovers, Bharati 

                    looks at him with some triumph.

                    PATEL: You wouldn’t dare tell them. Not you. Please, don’t! Not yet!

                    BHARATI: Then let me do what I want to do.

                    PATEL: (defeated) You cannot tell them. For their sake, don’t! (Looks 

                    at her suddenly with determination.) If at all they must know, it will be 

                    from me. Not from you. (345)

The disclosure comes towards the end of the play. Patel, a Gujrati man, is married to Bharati, a Kannadiga woman, and their inter-caste love marriage is not free from the ramifications of their social context. While Patel is disowned by his family, Bharati is backed by her wealthy and influential father. When Bharati gives birth to Siamese twins joined from the breastbone downwards and sharing one leg, they carry out a mad search for a doctor who can separate them. Luckily, they find hope in the form of Dr Thakkar. It so happens that the blood supply to the leg shared by the twins comes from Tara, so the leg has a better chance of survival in Tara’s body. However, Bharati and her father favour the boy child, and they make an unethical decision in collusion with Dr Thakkar, who is suitably rewarded to keep his mouth shut. They decide to give the leg to Chandan, whose body rejects it after two days. Had the leg remained with Tara there was a high likelihood of her body taking to it. This dark family secret which Patel discloses to his children at the end of the second act of the play has a devastating impact on their lives.

Besides exploring the fundamental aspects of secrecy, which include the related themes of guilt, repentance, betrayal, revenge and revelation, Dattani uses secrecy as a trope in the delineation of his characters. Bharati, whose decision to favour her son over her daughter, condemns her daughter to the life of a cripple or a “freak”, embodies the moral and psychological consequences of holding onto a secret motivated by guilt. Bharati’s love and excessive concern for Tara is apparent right from the beginning. She is desperate to donate her kidney to Tara despite the fact that they find a different donor, and that Patel does not want her to be the donor. At one point in the play, Patel accuses her of mollycoddling their daughter and turning her against him. She also displays an unhealthy protectiveness and obsession over Tara, when she bribes Roopa to befriend her daughter. Prior to the revelation, it appears as though Bharati is the one armed with a secret that can ruin her husband. But once her complicity in the crime is revealed, her children as well as the audience are able to see through her actions. Yet, there is something about Bharati that redeems her in our eyes: her repentance. It cannot be denied that Bharati is genuinely worried about Tara’s future and about the fact that she is worse off than Chandan: “The world will tolerate you. The world will accept you – but not her! Oh, the pain she is going to feel when she sees herself at eighteen or twenty. Thirty is unthinkable. And what about forty and fifty. Oh God” (349). Bharati’s guilt and anguish are further compounded by Patel’s apathetic attitude towards their daughter. While he has grand plans for Chandan, when it comes to Tara, he conveniently blames his wife’s over-protectiveness for his lack of interest in her. Bharati, who is also a victim of patriarchy, wants Tara to have a career and is distraught and outraged at Patel’s negligence towards his daughter. She desperately attempts to compensate for depriving her daughter when she tries to lure Roopa into befriending Tara: “She can be very witty and of course she is intelligent. I have seen to it that she…more than makes up in some ways for what she…doesn’t have” (340). The burden of Bharati’s guilt coupled with her painful realisation that she, being a woman herself, has been instrumental in the deprivation and marginalisation of her daughter, is what causes the strain on her mental health. She seeks expiation through confession which her husband cruelly denies her. She eventually has a mental breakdown and succumbs to death. 

           While it is Bharati who bears the full consequences of harbouring a dark secret, the other characters are also affected by the suppression as well as the disclosure of the secret in various ways. Patel is privy to the piece of information that Bharati has kept from her children all these years. While it completely destroys Bharati, the secret gives Patel immense power and moral superiority over his wife. Though Patel had no hand in the decision regarding the surgery of the twins, he is as guilty as Bharati when it comes to discriminating between them on the basis of gender. His rigid views on gender roles can be seen when he is incensed on finding Chandan helping his mother with his knitting and accuses Bharati of “turning him [Chandan] into a sissy-teaching him to knit” (351). He is loath to take Tara to his office despite Chandan’s suggestion that she is the one cut out for business. All he wants is a grand future for his son. He shows no concern for his daughter besides worrying over her fragile health. Thus, Patel is no better than Bharati in terms of favouring Chandan based on his gender. But what makes him worse, is the fact that he uses Bharati’s secret as a means of revenge. He had always resented the power and influence of Bharati’s wealthy father, thus, he used this opportunity to get back at his wife. He does not want to allow Bharati to donate her kidney to Tara or to give her the chance to confess. This renders him the cruellest character in the play. As GJV Prasad states “Both Patel and Bharati are complicit in the working of patriarchal norms, but though Bharati has changed because of her sense of guilt, Patel carries on merrily as if to rub Bharati’s nose in.” (Prasad,163)  

The most pitiable victims of the final revelation are Chandan and Tara. Chandan has to forever carry the burden of the guilt of having taken something that rightfully belonged to his sister, whom he considered to be a part of himself. When Tara calls him a bastard, he says “Vulgar girl! Calling yourself names!” (Dattani 361). Such is the bond between them. He suffers as much as Tara due to the patriarchal norms of society. His father does not allow him to pursue his ambition of becoming a writer because he wants him to take up his business instead. His father’s insensitivity in not understanding the strong bond that he shares with his sister makes things very difficult for him. After coming to know about the dreadful secret, he is so ridden with guilt that he flees all the way to London in order to distance himself from his past. His act of writing the play “Twinkle Tara” is a way of seeking forgiveness from his sister. 

The most tragic impact of the revelation however can be seen on Tara. As the female child of the family of Patels who were known to drown their “girl babies” in milk, Tara has always been a fighter in order to survive against the gender discrimination that she has had to constantly face at the hands of both her father and maternal grandfather. Her father denies her the opportunities that are readily made available to her brother, while her grandfather chooses to leave all his wealth to Chandan and cut her off completely. Though both Chandan and Tara are looked upon as “freaks” because of their limp, Tara is doubly marginalised on account of her gender as well as her disability. Yet she comes across as a feisty teenager who can not only fight her own battles but also take on the other “normal” people who wish to harm her brother. Tara derives her strength from her mother’s love. When Dan attempts to write the play about his sister, he asks himself “What is Tara? Kind, gentle, strong, her mother has given her strength.” (330) Tara’s greatest source of strength is her mother. Hence the revelation of the secret completely shatters the spirited young girl. Her utterance after the devastating discovery “And she called me her star!” (379), is both pathetic and ironic. The parent whom Tara considered to be her guardian angel turns out to be an accomplice in the crime committed against her. Dattani touches upon the issue of the internalisation of patriarchal values that causes women to participate in their own subordination. It is Bharati’s cultural conditioning that makes her favour her son and offer him a chance despite all medical odds. This cruel betrayal completely crushes Tara’s spirit; she loses her will to fight. Eventually she falls ill and dies broken-hearted.

In conclusion, Mahesh Dattani’s Tara deals with the story of the gradual disintegration of an urban middle-class family whose members are all cursed by a secret. Bharati and Patel know of it, Chandan and Tara don’t – but all four of them are overwhelmed by this dark burden which leads them inexorably towards their destruction. The play ends with a lonely and desolate Patel staring bleakly towards a future that holds no meaning. Bharati succumbs to her guilt, Tara succumbs to the sense of betrayal and Chandan tries to flee from himself, ending up as a schizoid maladjusted fugitive.