Santi & Naz

For as long as there is barsaat, you will be my friend.

Santi and Naz are bestest-best friends living in a village in pre-partition India. One Sikh, one Muslim; they have little understanding of how religion will divide them.

As partition draws closer, the girls remain oblivious to the spreading social unrest and violence. They’re too busy stealing books, swimming in the lake and spying on Rahul (the local hottie). When Naz is betrothed to a tailor from the soon-to-be capital of Pakistan the threat of separation for the young
women looms on the horizon. Bound by their love for each other we learn how far they will go to avoid the inevitable.

Guleraana Mir and afshan d’souza-lodhi’s Santi & Naz explores female friendship, coming of age, and coming out set against the backdrop of a country soon to be changed forever.

Recipient of the Fringe Society’s Keep It Fringe Fund and Winner of the Charlie Hartill Fund 2023.

This edition was published to coincide with the Thelmas’ production at London’s Soho Theatre in January 2025.

Guleraana Mir is an award-winning writer, theatre maker and one half of The Thelmas, a female-led theatre company devoted to redressing the equality imbalance in the arts. She is passionate about telling authentic stories that celebrate not stereotype, and speak to complex social realities in a fresh and disruptive way. She specialises in developing new work through devising and writing with young people and community groups, and leads writing programmes for artists of all ages at a number of institutions including National Theatre and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

afshan d’souza-lodhi was born in Dubai and forged in Manchester. She is a writer of scripts and poetry. Her work has been performed and translated into numerous languages across the world. afshan was a 2020 LabFellow for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University and took her one-woman show ’How To Eat Mangoes’ to Washington DC in 2022. In 2021, afshan was a Sky Writes writer-in-residence for Rotherham, a partnership between Sky Studios and New Writing North. She is currently part of the Royal Exchange and WarnerMedia writers exchange programme and is an Oldham Coliseum’s artist-in-residence. afshan was selected as one of the BAFTA BFI Flare mentees for 2022, and is currently developing a TV series with Sky Studios. She is also developing a TV series with co-writer Joe Willis and PDA films. The pilot ’Its My Party...’ was chosen for the SKY Table Reads programme.