Man of war

‘Sunil Lanba, Salman Quaraishi, Omar Syed…’ Names play from a crackling gramophone. We hear what they were before the war. Teacher. Engineer. Dancer. And what they endured during it. ‘I put down telephone cables in the mud,’ says one man. ‘Voices in the mud. Half of them already dead, sir.’ Already dead repeats and repeats. A juddering stuck record.

Akram Khan’s forgotten soldier — one of 1.5 million Indian men who fought in the trenches in the first world war — is also stuck. In Xenos, Khan’s last performance, though he will continue his career as a choreographer, a shell-shocked Indian sepoy has returned home in body — the Indian scene is set by percussionist B.C. Manjunath and singer Aditya Prakash — but his mind is still over there. The Somme. Ypres. Passchendaele. The gramophone plays a fragment of the bittersweet soldier’s song ‘The Old Battalion’. ‘If you want the old Battalion/ We know where they are/ We know where they are/ They’re hanging on the old barbed wire.’