Sarita fails her exams. Twice. Her family is disappointed, and for a while she considers giving up on more than just her studies. Then she doesn't — she takes a job teaching at a nursery school, keeps house, studies at night, comes down with typhoid mid-exam and finishes anyway, second division, with her family finally behind her. That's the whole play, performed solo by Vrinda Gujral, and it was this week's offering in Natrang's long-running Sunday Theatre series in Jammu.
Aap Ki Sarita is written by Satish Chitravanshi and directed by Neeraj Kant, who also designed the lighting; Kushal Bhat plays Sarita's father, Aadesh Dhar handled sound and Pawan Verma managed the presentation. It's a small, single-actor production — the kind Natrang has been staging free, every Sunday, for over two decades — and it leans entirely on Gujral carrying a character through failure, illness and a slow rebuild of confidence.
Why it's worth knowing about
The story is unapologetically about the part of student life nobody puts on a certificate: failing a paper, facing your family about it, and having to decide whether that's the end of the story. For anyone in Jammu who's sat a re-exam, a play built entirely around a second-division comeback is a more honest piece of exam-season culture than most of what gets said out loud about results day.
Natrang's Sunday Theatre has kept a play running every week in Jammu for 22 years without charging admission — JammuBeat covered the series' history and how to catch a show here. Last week's slot went to Sagar Sarhadi's 'Yeh Kaun Aaya'; this week it was Sarita's turn. If you missed this one, the series runs again next Sunday — check Natrang's own listings for the next production.
