h.b floating palace is a meditation on the life of an elderly Indian couple—Sher and Puja—who, after spending twenty years in a suburban home in Massachusetts, suddenly find themselves living on a houseboat in the scenic Kashmir Valley in Northern India.
Originally intended as a retirement, and an escape, Sher and Puja soon find that their new life in Kashmir does not free them from the past. As Sher searches for a missing childhood friend and Puja attempts to keep family disputes at bay, the play explores how two tragic events—the 1947 partition of India-Pakistan and the Kashmir conflict—continue to shape national identity and state formation in India today.
h.b floating palace repeatedly blurs the fault lines between the past and the present, memory and imagination, personal and collective trauma, romance and suffering, nostalgia and tragedy, mapping the story of Sher and Puja's life onto the arbitrary border lines that have shaped India in the past seven decades.
Photos by Wenjie Xie