There is a moment when the quiet silence amid the conversation goes from being a formality to a contemplation. “I am sorry I get emotional,” admits Aditi Mangaldas, as she pauses between the conversation with this writer at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) during the announcement of the show. It was the talk of the atrocities visited upon children by war across the globe, in particular the Gaza Genocide that made us all so.

“We have not lived in this world before. A child being brutalised is not a statistic,” the veteran says. Out of this bleakness emerges the artiste’s response — The Absence of Presence, a landmark cross-cultural collaboration presented by the Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company and The Drishtikon Dance Foundation that opens at the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre on October 31.