After Histoire de renaissances and Hunger, it's fire! L'Asiathèque publishes a new bilingual work by Krishna Baldev Vaid (1927-2020) bringing together two of his plays. The two plays presented here evoke the contemporary problems of the subcontinent in very lively everyday, even popular language, the comedy of which is largely derived from the deconstruction of clichés and fixed phrases. One of the plays, Our Old Lady (2000) explicitly brings into play the allegory of Mother India, the great mother of Nehruvian patriotism, to deconstruct all of its features, but it appeals more broadly to the feeling of escheat that characterizes the youth of twenty-first century India. Rejecting this allegorical mother at the same time that they do not manage to detach themselves from it […] the five acolytes (three men, two women) who are the only characters in the play, continually take turns in the same order to wonder about their relationship with the anonymous abandoned old woman, their own cowardice, their lust, colonialism and its remains, and finally human nature and the politics of history (excerpt from Annie Montaut's preface).