KARACHI: Are you someone who turns to ChatGPT for therapy? If so, Rumi Aur Main, written by Nighat Gandhi and directed by Fawad Khan, might speak to you. Staged at T2F for three days, the play confronts a reality many would rather ignore: that robots and technology can never replace human emotions.

The play revolves around two characters: an elderly widow, played by Sana Toaha, and a robot named Rumi, played by Yogeshwar Karera. It explores complex emotions, including anticipatory grief, a particularly difficult feeling to portray, but the actors made a sincere effort to bring it close to reality, and they largely succeeded.

The portrayal of grief is underexplored in this play, especially considering the fact that the female protagonist loses her mother, and also the fact that, in the same scene, she handles the feeling of anticipatory grief remarkably when she gets the call from the doctors about her mother’s condition. When she comes back home, she tells Rumi about how she ‘permitted’ her mother to go, after keeping her on a ventilator and forcing her to stay alive for quite a long while. The robot, being a robot, listens to her and gives a mechanical answer, portraying that human emotions and robotic emotions will always stay different from each other.

Play staged at T2F explores the complex relationship between a widow and a robot named Rumi

Similarly, there was another powerful scene where, in a conversation between the two characters, the female protagonist says that even though Rumi has been a good companion, he can never be human. Rumi responds by saying he doesn’t even want to be human because he likes the way he is, designed to learn and memorise everything, but not to feel. The undertone of this scene is that artificial intelligence can do many things, but understanding the complexity of human emotions is beyond its comprehension.

As the play proceeds, the layers of the female protagonist’s character become visible. In one scene, she talks about how she thinks more with her heart than her brain, for which she was often shamed by her late husband. She also thanks Rumi for understanding and learning her habits so well. This highlights a side of feminine emotion, where women are often conditioned to feel more with the heart and seek understanding, reassurance, and the need to be seen and heard. When they don’t receive this emotional connection in real life, they may turn to replacements, just as she turned to Rumi.

The play explored several other themes, including traditional religion, the concept of self through the comparison of technology and humans, helplessness, and change. The theme of change formed the play’s closing note, where the female protagonist’s daughter brings her a replacement for Rumi after a turn of events. She reacts bitterly to the new robot, and in a heated conversation, the daughter tells her that the only difference between the new robot and Rumi is a ‘chip’, the component that operates his memory.

The end of the play was again a reminder that AI would never be a replacement for humans.

Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2025