Her upper lip is the stage and a 25-year-old woman, the performer. A long stick immaculately placed atop the lip stands perfectly balanced carrying puppets. She sits on a mat, her legs straightened, eyes upward, her hands manoeuvring the strings to set in motion legends from the epic.

Renjini KS, the only performer of traditional art form 'Nokkuvidya Paavakali', a centuries-old form of puppetry, even measures the pace at which she blinks her eyes when performing. A slight quiver could be ruinous. Once a fly buzzed in and nearly brushed her eyes, she blinked for a second. The stick that had seemed glued to her lip came off. It's heartbreaking for an artiste who had put in years, perfecting the poise and balance needed for the art.

A resident of Monippally in Kottayam, Renjini keeps the legacy of her grandmother Moozhikkal Pankajakshi Amma, the revered performer of Nokkuvidya who was awarded with Padma Shri in 2020. The art form is as much about patience as about pain. Whenever Renjini performs, her mother Radhamani waits in the backstage, her arms folded in prayer.

The performance spans an hour. Throughout this period, the artiste balances the stick with puppets weighing around 500gm on the lip. The sole semblance of a support is the tip of the nose which rubs against the stick. As it presses hard on her lips under the weight of puppets, the gums bleed. The neck and the back hurt and by the time she wraps up, her eyes well up and so would be her mother's. Once, she had to do back-to-back shows in Delhi, and the pain was unbearable when it ended. She came home with a chilling fever.

"No matter how painful it is, I love the way people look at the performance. There is a sense of awe in their eyes. When I see that, I don't think about the pain," says Renjini. She had started practising balancing the stick on her lips at the age of eight. The temptation was the boxes of chocolates her grandmother brought after a performance in Paris. "My mother wanted me to learn this art. She couldn't master this because it is difficult and she was so keen on me learning this. When grandma came back from Paris, I got many chocolates. My mother said, if I became an artiste, I could also get many chocolates," says Renjini.

It wasn't just a sweet tale though. Pankajakshi Amma had returned from Paris, dismayed. She hadn't been able to perform well. She realized age had caught up with her. She was even worried that there wouldn't be many takers for the art form in future. As a child, Renjini began practising with baby coconuts attached to a stick. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't find the balance. Her brother Renjith chipped in by shaping something out of wood and slowly Renjini picked up.

Years of practice would do little to ease the pain. While narrating some tales, there would be two puppets like the clash of Ram and Ravana, more the puppets, bitter the pain. During the performance, the story is first narrated to the viewers which is followed by the artiste portraying the episode. Longer the story, more rest for the performer; it isn't much, 40 seconds of rest could still feel like heaven for her, the only time she can breathe and blink normally and stretch.

A BCom graduate, Renjini knows that the future is not very bright for Nokkuvidya Paavakali. "I started learning this along with my cousins. All of them dropped out. This may not be a source of livelihood for me, but I want to keep this alive as long as I can," she says.