ONE night in Dundee, a woman and two men break into a Spar supermarket. They get drunk. One bloke urges the other to respect the woman. And that’s about all there is to Hindu Times.
 
Whether this situation is dramatic, or plausible, enough to be a play is open to question and you learn very little about the characters in Jaimini Jethwa’s work, her contribution to Soundstage, the new season of audio plays hosted by the Royal Lyceum Edinburgh and Pitlochry Festival theatres.

Speaking an elaborate Dundonian patois, the characters don’t appear to have families or social connections. And they fantasise that they are Hindu gods and goddesses.

For sure, it’s bizarrely amusing to hearing the words Marhabharata, Dashavatara and Bhagavad Gita in thick Scots accents, in sentences that include the words “North Pus,” “nae ridin’ and bidin’” and “a’ this ding-dong charlie.”

Hindu Times aspires to poetry but falls short and when the characters profess their love to one another they do it through long lists of Dundonian attributes, sprinkled with Rushdie-esque eastern exotica. And, improbably, they swoon.
 
Along with the likes of Jenny Fagan’s Panopticon, Hindu Times belongs to a post-Trainspotting sub-genre in Scottish writing that is content to draw stereotypical two-dimensional working-class characters as two-dimensional stereotypes.

They compensate for lack of character and plot with some surreal convention. In this case, they are foul-mouthed, football obsessed and nothing more — other than highly literate in DIY Hindu ritual.
 
But rather than deliver a social satire as Welsh might have done, Hindu Times is content to serve up a sentimental message and to leave it at that.

Offering no insight into a Scottish Hindu community, it manages to be charmless, classist and Orientalist all at the same time. No mean feat for what the characters themselves dismiss as “fly-by-night pished banter.”

Hindu Times is available online from Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the Royal Lyceum.