The Bombay Plays Read online

  The Matka King

  “Excellent characterization and humor bring (this) cruel drama to life.” —The Vancouver Sun

  “ . . . raunchy yet elegant . . . an engaging exploration of the darker side of human nature.” —The Westender

  “Top Rani’s desire to understand his sexuality is very powerful. And this is perhaps where east meets west in Irani’s intriguing play.”

  —Vancouver Courier

  “Throughout, the writing is deliciously biting and the exchanges very clever. Every line is an opportunity to comment and satirize while the images are vivid and unexpected. Despite (or because of) the humour and the harshness, we feel deeply for these characters.” —Canadian Literature

  Bombay Black

  “Irani entwines fantasy with reality . . . a moving story.” —Time Out Mumbai

  “It is a play that proves the strength of love over hatred and the power of dreams over the desire for revenge. Bombay Black deals with horrific realities and difficult choices. The play succeeds in being both grotesque and poignant.” —The Hindu, New Delhi

  “Bombay Black has taken the gender war to where it should belong. It no longer considers femininity to be the obliging lump of flesh for male chauvinism to knead, pound and mould into carnal subjugation. In contrast, femininity here is a hissing snake with unadulterated anger, writhing and waiting to pounce upon the sinning male for revenge. Bombay Black is a searing play.” —The Pioneer, New Delhi

  “The acting is brilliant. Apsara as a dancer is fabulous, Kamal with his convincing dialogue delivery, holds the spectator, but Padma with her wicked sense of humour steals the show. Bombay Black brings to fore ugly contrasts and a precarious balance between hope and despair.” —Every Tuesday

  “The play’s plot is engaging and the acting is impressive.” —The Asian Age

  “Anosh Irani creates a world of magic and realism that simultaneously exist in his play. The story and characters comfortably travel in and out of reality with the help of their imagination; one minute they are in the living room, the next in a golden chariot.” —Mid Day

  **** “Playwright Anosh Irani carefully navigates between convincing casual conversation and rich lyricism . . . a precarious balance between beautiful mythology and ugly realism, between hope and despair.”

  —Eye Weekly

  NNNN “Anosh Irani’s sultry, spooky and surreal tale of thwarted love and bittersweet revenge.” —Now Magazine

  “ . . . promisingly written . . . a masterful blend of eroticism and mystery.” —Toronto Star

  “The language of the play is dense and lyrical, the story layered and complex. It’s a truly beautiful script, a powerful story told in heightened language.”

  —inamagickingdom.com

  “Bombay Black asks its audience to reflect on motivations for human nature and dwell on life’s big questions, even as they suspend their disbelief.” —Torontoist

  “The play unfolds partly as a love story, partly as a study in the oldest of all dramatic subjects, the ethics of revenge. Pungent and lyrical and sometimes witty. Line by line, Irani never hits a false note.”

  —The National Post

  “Bombay Black is an intricately designed and woven piece of theatre that blends movement, poetry, folklore, and a rather complex story line.” —Mooney on Theatre

  Also by Anosh Irani

  Novels

  The Cripple and His Talismans

  The Song of Kahunsha

  Dahanu Road

  The Parcel

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Matka King

  Production History

  Characters

  Setting

  ACT ONE

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  ACT TWO

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Epilogue

  Bombay Black

  Production History

  Characters

  Setting

  ACT ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  ACT TWO

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  About the Author

  For Bill Millerd.

  Introduction

  There is an unwritten rule, or, if it is writ, it lies sculpted on God’s arm. Once your journey begins, you cannot end it. You can propel yourself off track, skid in different mud, but it will only make your journey that much longer.

  —The Cripple and His Talismans

  Soft-spoken and quiet but not shy, Anosh Irani is one of many newcomers to Canada who are laying claim to a special place in their new country’s artistic life.

  Born in Bombay, now named Mumbai, in 1974 and growing up in Byculla, in a Parsi colony, Irani obtained his BComm (1995) from the University of Bombay before embarking on a career as a copywriter in a Bombay advertising agency. In l998 he immigrated to Vancouver, where distance from Bombay gave him perspective on the place of his birth and upbringing. In Vancouver he studied creative writing and literature at Capilano College for one year, then transferred to the department of creative writing at the University of British Columbia, where he obtained his BFA (2002) and MFA (2004) in creative writing, a world he began to explore only after he had reached Canada.

  In The Cripple and His Talismans (2004), his much acclaimed debut novel, Irani recounts the modern fable of an anonymous hero who wanders through present-day Bombay in search of his severed arm. Bombay is one of Irani’s muses. Calling the city his “favourite place in the world,” Irani seeks to depict its multi-faceted culture. “It has a lot of soul,” he reflects. “I will always consider it home, but there’s so much corruption, so much poverty. It’s hard for people to survive there.” The journey through presents the city’s incredible suffering as well as its beautiful mysteries, the novel being at once a magic-realist fable and a frank portrayal of poverty and pain.

  A master storyteller narrates the fable. “Ever since I was little, I was good at telling stories, I was good at invention, making things up on the spot,” Irani says. “I come from a long line of storytellers, none of whom are writers, but it’s just that we used to get drunk on family occasions and spread vicious lies about people who weren’t there. That’s the purest form of storytelling; you can’t get any better than that.”

  In his second novel, the grimly realistic The Song of Kahunsha (2006), Chamdi, a young boy of ten, runs away from his Bombay orphanage, meeting up with Sumdi and Guddi, a brother and sister in a gang of beggars, and the trio wander the city in all its glory and gore. Sectarian violence in the form of bloody confrontations between Hindus and Muslims propels the plot forward to its tragic conclusion. Finding no evidence of love or compassion in the city, Chamdi seeks his own language, phrases that are spoken only in Kahunsha. “To him this means ‘the city of no sadness.’ Someday all sadness will die, he believes, and Bombay will be reborn as Kahunsha.”

  Dahanu Road (2010), Irani’s intensely personal third novel, is an epic account of an impoverished family of Zoroastrians who leave Iran to pursue comfortable but troubled lives as landlords on an Indian farm. “
A lot of it is based on experiences of the place I know really well—stories from my mom and dad, stories that I remembered as a child. But there comes a point when you have to leave all that and just imagine. And you become a storyteller.” The novel’s plot is dark, the tragedy residing in the battle between the land-owning Zoroastrians and the tribal Warli people who work for them. This power imbalance leads to abuse, suicide, and murder.

  The Parcel (2016), his fourth and finest novel, looks penetratingly at Mumbai’s red-light district, Kamathipura, and in particular Hijra House, where a band of eunuchs have found their own residence. Outsiders to polite society, they dwell on the margins, forming their own idea of a family. Madhu, the novel’s protagonist, is forty years of age and had known better days as a sex worker; now she is forced to earn her living by begging in the city centre. The details in the novel are astoundingly grim, the portraits of its people filled with tragedy leavened by occasional moments of humour. To Irani’s immense credit, one cannot help but constantly turn the pages of this frightening but great novel. The Parcel was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

  Irani, however, is not only a significant novelist. Even before the publication of his debut novel, his first play, The Matka King, premiered at Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre in October 2003. The protagonist is a eunuch who was castrated when he was ten years old. “Eunuchs are like stand-up comedians,” comments Irani. “They’re kind of scoundrels, but you like them because they’re very funny. But at the same time they can sometimes be vicious.” Eunuchs live in a secretive Indian subculture, and The Matka King exposes some of this subculture in a tale of lust, love, and betrayal. Complete with its scenes of ghosts, human beings in cages, and death, the play transfixes its audience with its presentation of human beings caught in the tragedy of life.

  In his second play, Bombay Black, which premiered at Toronto’s Theatre Centre in January 2006, Irani reduces his cast to three people: the iron-willed Padma, her daughter Apsara, and a mysterious blind man, Kamal, whose visit sets in motion a harrowing tale of seduction, love, and revenge. At times beautifully lyrical, at other times realistically brutal, the play weaves into its plot elements of myth and magic that propel the characters (and the audience) into a fantastic flight of the imagination. At Toronto’s Dora Mavor Moore Awards in 2006, the play won four awards, including one for Irani for outstanding new play.

  My Granny the Goldfish, his third play, premiered at the Arts Club Theatre’s Revue Stage in Vancouver in 2010. Nico, a young Indian student in Vancouver, is hospitalized, and his grandmother from Mumbai arrives to help him. Both places, Mumbai and Vancouver, are central to the story and also central to Irani’s imagination.

  His fourth play, The Men in White: A Tale of Love, Brotherhood, and Cricket, which premiered at the Arts Club Theatre’s Granville Island Stage in 2017, follows Abdul’s cricket team as its members decide to end their losing streak by recruiting Abdul’s brother from India. But the cost of the transportation proves disconcerting for some members. “There was a connection between the two worlds: Bombay and Canada,” reflects Irani. “The wounds of one world open up in another. And wounds are tricky beings. They remain masked until the most seemingly benign things cause them to rupture all over again.”

  In the development of Canadian literature there is a curious phenomenon: many of our finest artists move easily from one genre to another. Leonard Cohen, for example, is a fine lyric poet who also writes impressive fiction. Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and others, too, began their careers as poets, then moved on to become major fiction writers who have never forsaken their poetic art.

  Irani moves effortlessly between two genres, fiction and drama, equally at ease in both. To his art he brings the welcome sounds and traditions of India, incorporating them into tales that are at once Indian and universal.

  With this new edition of Anosh Irani’s first two plays, readers have the opportunity to savour his dramas and to admire their inventive complexities.

  —David Staines

  The Matka King

  Production History

  The Matka King was workshopped and given public readings at the Arts Club Theatre’s ReACT showcase in 2002 and 2003; the CrossCurrents Festival in 2002 and 2004 at Factory Theatre, Toronto; and at the On the Verge festival in 2002 at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa. It was first published in Canadian Theatre Review.

  The Matka King premiered in October 2003 at the Arts Club Theatre, Vancouver, with the following cast and creative team:

  Top Rani: Craig Veroni

  Guru Gantaal: Marvin Ishmael

  Satta: Allan Zinyk

  Chandni: Laara Sadiq

  Aarti: Anouska Anderson Kirby

  Director and dramaturg: Rachel Ditor

  Artistic managing director: Bill Millerd

  Puppeteer: Lois Anderson

  Set design: Robert Gardiner

  Lighting design: Marsha Sibthorpe

  Costume design: Barbara Clayden

  Sound design: Noah Drew

  Stage managers: Chris Allan and Pamela Jakobs

  Assistant stage manager: Anne Taylor

  Design assistant: Erin Harris

  Characters

  Top Rani: A eunuch in his thirties.

  Chandni: A prostitute in her twenties.

  Aarti: A ten-year-old girl.

  Satta: A gambler in his late thirties.

  Gantaal: A fortune teller of about fifty.

  Setting

  The play takes place in Bombay at:

  a) Top Rani’s brothel.

  b) Grant Road.

  The time is the present.

  ACT ONE

  Prologue

  top rani enters dressed in a sari. His hair is long but tied back. He has bangles on his wrists.

  top rani: Come, come, enter my brothel. I have big-big girls for little-little prices. And little-little girls for big-big prices. Cheapest is ten rupees only. Surely you must have ten rupees. If you don’t want complete insertion, then simple massage is also there. With happy ending.

  Pause.

  No? Oh, you enemy of love. You must be married. Is that your wife? Hello, beautiful. The word for tonight is “Legs.” Spread the word.

  Pause.

  Let me show you around. You are in a red-light district called Kamathipura. There is a small merry-go-round just outside my window. It is operated by a pimp. Every evening, while his whores work, he gives their children free rides. Next to the merry-go-round is a doctor’s dispensary. He has written the names of famous diseases on a whiteboard—syphilis, gonorrhea, and TB—none of which he can cure. Then there is Café Andaaz, where the prostitutes collect for their afternoon tea and pretend they are free. But in this city, no one is free. I realized that when I was ten years old. I was sent here by my father to work as a servant boy. I had dreams then. Now I can hardly remember what they were. The truth is there is no such thing as an Indian Dream. If there was, it died the day this city was born. Welcome to Bombay.

  One

  Grant Road. December 30th. Eight forty-five p.m. Guru gantaal sits on the footpath. A large steel trunk rests in front of him. The sound of a car rushing past. Smoke from the car covers gantaal’s face. He coughs violently.

  gantaal: Time for cigarette.

  He removes a cigarette from behind his ear and puts it to his lips, but does not light it. The sound of another car going past. He cocks his head forward in anticipation of the exhaust fumes. He exhales in time with the car’s expulsion of smoke, pretending that he has blown cigarette smoke.

  Cars cause smoking. Smoking causes cigarettes. It is a vicious cycle.

  Enter satta on a cycle. satta’s cycle is old and beaten. It has a huge bugle-like horn on it and a large placard that says “God is great but always late.”

  A
vicious cycle indeed.

  satta: Guru Gantaal. Please tell me. It’s almost nine o’clock.

  gantaal: Okay. It’s almost nine o’clock.

  satta: Don’t do this to me. Tonight, I have to win. A lot of money is at stake.

  satta shows him a fat wad of notes.

  gantaal: Where did you get that?

  satta: I sold my kholi.

  gantaal: Sold it? Now where will you live?

  satta: There’s no time to explain.

  gantaal: Then tonight I will show you something that is very precious to me.

  satta rubs his hands in anticipation. gantaal opens the lid of the trunk and without looking he puts his hand in. He screams in agony. He closes the lid and shakes his hand as though he has been stung.

  satta: What happened?

  gantaal: My cobra bit me.

  satta: You have a cobra in there? Is it poisonous?

  gantaal: Very poisonous. I sometimes forget that the little one is still in there.

  satta: Shouldn’t you be rushing to a hospital?

  gantaal: What for?

  satta: It bit you.

  gantaal: I used to be a snake charmer. Cobras never kill the hand that feeds them. He is just angry that he is locked in this trunk. But if you put your hand in, you will need to see a hospital. Anyway, I’m looking for my parrot.

  satta: A cobra and parrot stay in the same trunk?

  gantaal: The parrot is fake.

  He brings satta closer to him. He opens the lid again.

  Satta, have you heard of any new methods?

  satta: I have heard of this new method called the Ant Race. It’s very effective. You place ten sugar cubes in a row on the ground. Then you keep watch over the next few minutes as ants gather. Whichever cube the ants go to first, that is the opening number of the day. So if they go first to the cube placed fifth in the row, then the opening number is five. The cube the ants go to last, that is the closing number.