India, Sept. 22 -- I must have been nine or ten when my father dragged us along to watch a play whose title I could not yet pronounce: Aashadh Ka Ek Din, staged at the National School of Drama (NSD). I remember almost nothing of Mohan Rakesh's actual plot: Kalidasa torn between the mountain girl who loved him and the throne that would later claim him. What I remember instead is smaller and stranger - the particular hush that fell over the room the moment the lights dimmed, a hush I had never once encountered inside a cinema hall, where people rustle chip packets and check their phones through the interval. I remember an actress crying real tears eight feet from where I sat, close enough that I could see her chest rise, and being seized by...