Salome Rebello and Sujay Saple on home turf in Bandra. Pics/Pradeep Dhivar

They shine bright, incandescent stars in their spheres. Choir conductor and music teacher Salome, and actor-director Sujay have collaborated only on a one-off production in 2018. He choreographed Lullaby, Stranger, the outstanding choral novelty she brilliantly conducted, which audiences reclined on mattresses to watch.
“Lullaby, Stranger with Sujay is my dearest creation I’m proudest of to date,” Salome says, of the sensorially stellar production embracing the Beatles, a cappella ballads, Gospel tunes and the lilting “Allah Goor”. Sujay says, “The joyful process of devising Lullaby, Stranger with Salome remains my favourite work, among the finest performance pieces anywhere.”

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Lullaby, Stranger joins a remarkable repertoire involving body fluidity and challenging ensemble exercises—the hallmark of Shapeshift, the group Sujay founded to explore a strong physical theatre vocabulary. “I’m more tailored to the aural, he to movement,” observes Salome.

They hit it off the moment a mutual friend, theatre practitioner Rachel D’Souza, introduced them in 2004 at St Xavier’s College. Spotting her name on the admissions list, Salome caught Sujay in a spontaneous hug. A self-confessed “terrible student” who thought himself too cool for school, he wondered what the fuss was about.
Shared home miles meant the Khar boy and Bandra girl hopped aboard the same train to college—or attempted to (“I struggled getting out of bed, she carried on”). They overlapped for sociology and French lit classes (“Sleeping through lectures, Sujay helped himself to my notes and suddenly spouted Baudelaire’s poetry he pretended he knew forever”).

He marvels, “Salome was Ms Perfect, she always had her shit together. Studying with her, I scratched my head saying: ‘Damn, now where did these seven chapters spring from!’”

Food a big bond, they hung out with friends at the sandwich wala outside college, at Kayani and Martin’s. Dhobi Talao was their stamping ground of the campus years. Their childhood space is a comfort zone. “Indulging our major sweet tooth at Natural Ice Cream and Amore, which was on Carter Road, we still snack at charming old bakeries like Hearsch, Andora and American Express Cafe,” Salome says. “Roaming every Bandra lane and promenade, we’ve walked the tiniest fishing village paths with amazing histories.”

At 16, Sujay’s journey began with his mentor Atul Kumar’s Voices, for The Company Theatre. The experiment wowed viewers, staged in foot-high water pools at venues from Prithvi in Juhu to the 1822-built Municipal Theatre in Mauritius, which he describes as “the utterly gorgeous, second oldest colonial-style opera house in the Southern Hemisphere”.  

Just 17 when she taught children singing at the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation, Salome never dreamt of emerging an internationally trained conductor. She thanks Sujay for first steering her in this direction. “On a rickshaw ride he told me, ‘You need to get the hell out of here.’ That left me curious.”  
Sujay explains, “Touring with Atul, I’d enjoyed that sense of expansion. With her talent and rigour, Salome would be a big fish in a small pond, stuck doing sweet local gigs. See, I gave her more than fashion advice.” Indignant, Salome says, “Finding my clothes plain, throughout college he took it upon himself to ‘dress’ me, so off we went Fashion Street shopping.”

That her sartorial style was ever in doubt is unthinkable, watching her wield the baton in impeccably cut suits. Her concerts of note include the Jerusalem YMCA’s Christmas Eve special (the only celebration of Christmas in west Jerusalem) and the Israeli premiere of Sir Karl Jenkins’ beautifully contemporary Mass for Peace, originally a 15th-century chanson, with soloists of three Abrahamic faiths—a muezzin, a priest, a Jewish cantor.

“I discovered my true love is conducting,” says Salome, earning her a master’s in choral conducting from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. She was also appointed soprano in the Jerusalem Academy Chamber Choir, conducted by maestro Stanley Sperber. “The choir sang a lot with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and conductors Zubin Mehta, Krzysztof Penderecki and Kent Nagano.”

While Salome was halfway into her Israel years, Sujay launched Shapeshift in 2012—“I decided to start realising my kind of vision, put myself on the line, being prepared to fail.” Unselfed, his directorial debut, opened at Adishakti near Auroville and was invited to festivals. Milestones following it included the hard-hitting Agent Provocateur. “Focused on fascist ideologies and political censorship, that really resonated with audiences having similar anxieties about the country.”

The friends have stayed invested in each other’s personal relationships from the years of undergrad crushes. Teaming up to holiday in Portugal after one has had a break-up or needs getting over some other low, they lean close. “Over time we’ve let our guard down, unlocking and revealing ourselves with absolute lack of judgement,” Sujay says.  

Salome adds, “He is so loving. No matter how far a situation is in shambles, he makes you laugh. There’s nothing not unique about Sujay. With his girlfriend in Bangalore, and Rachel and me in Bombay, I joke he’s a man with many wives but romantically connected to only one of them.” Salome has shifted base to Germany where her partner is principal violist of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.  

 Both prefer working with community, rather than solo art forms. What he calls “plain jugaad”, she admires as his “awesome resourcefulness”. With the gift of arrow-straight honest feedback, they bring each other divergent perspectives.

“I’m a junkie for nuance,” she admits. Sujay agrees, summing up—“Salome is the most level-headed person, incapable of being anything but genuine. These have to be the greatest qualities in a friend.”      

Author-publisher Meher Marfatia writes monthly on city friendships. You can reach her at meher.marfatia@mid-day.com/www.meher marfatia.com