Anosh Irani

profile by Joe Wiebe
posted March 11, 2005

It is late February, and though much of Canada is still locked in a deep freeze, spring has arrived here in Vancouver. The sun shines down and the breeze carries the fresh scent of newly blossoming trees in the residential West End of downtown. At a Robson Street café, Anosh Irani consents to sit outside. He carries his chai to a sidewalk table, but does not take off his parka in spite of the heavy sweater underneath. Though he has lived here for five years, it seems this Bombay native has not yet grown accustomed to the colder climate.

“I can’t stand snow,” Irani jokes at one point in our interview. Considering that his choice to move to Vancouver was somewhat random — he joined three friends who were moving here to study at Simon Fraser University — he is lucky he did not end up in another city where snow is a more regular occurrence.

Irani’s move here has led to literary success; he is arguably one of Vancouver’s hottest young writers. At twenty-nine, he has already had one play produced professionally, has another one in the works, and his first novel, The Cripple and His Talismans (Raincoast Books, $29.95) has just been published. This impressive debut, a beautifully written modern-day fable about a man who loses an arm and goes on a quest to find it, is a book that is sure to garner Irani plenty of attention.

Not bad considering he only started writing after moving here in 1998.

Irani’s childhood was split between Bombay and his family’s fruit farm in Dahanu about 200 kilometres from the city, where he spent some weekends and all of his extended breaks from school. “I’m an only child but I have a large extended family of cousins whom I was very close to.”

Growing up, he never considered himself a writer, though he 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 the people who weren’t there. That’s the purest form of storytelling; you can’t get any better than that.”

He was more interested in soccer and cricket than literature and writing in high school, but after graduating, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life.

“I did a business degree because that’s what men do in India; you don’t take arts, it doesn’t make sense.” But that degree turned out to be “absolutely of no use to me at all” because he was starting to realize that he wanted to be a writer. He found work as a copy writer in a Bombay advertising agency for a year, but when his friends decided to move to Vancouver, he elected to join them.

“I just wanted to experience something that was different,” he explains. “I wanted to move to a different country. And I’m glad I did because now when I look back at Bombay it helps me get a better perspective on the place. It think distance helps, in both physical distance as well as time. It helps me to write.”

He studied Creative Writing and Literature at Capilano College in North Vancouver for a year, and then enrolled in UBC’s Creative Writing department, a prestigious writing workshop programme that has helped produced many notable writers over the past several years, including Nancy Lee, Steven Galloway, and Zsuzsi Gartner.

He also landed a job at the Arts Club Theatre as Artistic Director Bill Millerd’s assistant. When Irani showed Millerd one of his short stories, “Bullet Number One,” Millerd told Irani to adapt it into a play. That play, The Matka King, premiered at the Arts Club last fall.

“I’ve been fortunate to meet people who have believed in my writing and have supported me, because there is no way you can do it alone. You can write a great play but if no one believes in your writing or no one is interested in taking a risk… My work is a bit risky in the sense that they are stories that really have not been told. They’re set in Bombay, and there’s not too many plays that are set in Bombay.”

Irani’s work is risky not only in its unusual setting, but also in its subject matter. The protagonist of The Matka King is a eunuch who was castrated when he was ten years old. Even today, eunuchs form a visible (though secretive) subculture in Bombay.

“Eunuchs are like stand-up comedians,” Irani says. “They’re kind of scoundrels, but you like them because they’re very funny. But at the same time, they’re vicious.”

There is also a whole realm of superstition surrounding eunuchs, Irani explains. “When a male child is born, a eunuch goes to the house to bless the male child so that the child may be a man. If he curses the child, then the child may be impotent. So they get money. The eunuchs live in a very secretive subculture. Some people say they even have their own language. They are not very open except for the flamboyant side, but you hardly know anything about their real life.”

So far, all of Irani’s writing has been set in Bombay, although the new play he is working on, Manja’s Circus, could be set anywhere as it is about a travelling circus. Bombay is clearly Irani’s muse. He calls that city his “favourite place in the world,” but admits that “right now it does seem like a dark place. It has a lot of soul, don’t get me wrong, and that’s what I love about Bombay. I will always consider it home, but there’s so much corruption, so much poverty. It’s hard for people to survive over there.”

Bombay inspires him, but Irani’s vision of Bombay differs from that of Rohinton Mistry, whose work Irani admires greatly. “Rohinton Mistry is one of my favourite authors,” he says. “The first collection of short stories that he wrote, Tales from Firozsha Baag, was actually the first collection of stories that I read in my life. I sort of lived in the same apartment complex that he described in the book, and it’s quite accurate although it’s fictional of course. He’s very good with character; he’s very good with creating characters that are extremely human.”

While Mistry’s Bombay is detailed with such exactness that a reader could almost use one of his novel’s as a roadmap, Irani’s is more subjective.

“I’ll start with something realistic,” he says, “and then for example, if there is a school, if there is a church, I’ll describe those and then I’ll put something else that isn’t there. So you can never absolutely identify where that place is.”

The Bombay Irani describes in his novel is a squalid, overgrown, mystical place populated by a diverse range of characters: a leper who bites off his own finger and gives it to the protagonist who uses it as a sort of compass; a woman who sells rainbows; a street preacher who goads his congregation into punishing a man who dared to fall asleep during the sermon; a coffin-maker who builds finger-sized coffins; and a powerful and menacing underworld figure named Baba Rakhu, who might be able to locate a new arm — for the right price.

Irani’s love affair with Bombay is a complicated relationship. “It is an absurd place. There are things that happen over there that would not happen anywhere else, and that’s part of its charm, and that’s why I miss it so much.”

He may miss Bombay, but he also credits his distance from home with helping him become a writer. “I think what helped me honestly was the fact that I moved to a different country. It forced me to write. I didn’t have much of a life, and I think that’s a blessing, because if you have too many things to do, you don’t write. Eventually, you will have to write no matter what, but because I in a way did feel isolated away from home, it helped me write a lot.”

What about Vancouver? “It’s very calm. Too much calm can numb your brain. You need a balance, that’s the thing. In Bombay, maybe the balance is a little too dark at times. In a city like Bombay, if you have to live there, you do need a sense of humour. Because you have no control over anything really, there is no system. Unless you have lots of money, then you’re OK.”

Irani is happy in Vancouver, though. He has become a Canadian citizen, and his “plan is to stay here and go back to Bombay whenever I can.”

“I will tell stories that are set in Vancouver, but I just don’t know when. Right now, there are too many that are set in Bombay that I am itching to write, but if something naturally lends itself to be set here, I’m sure I’ll write it.”

For now, Anosh Irani will take advantage of the calmness of Canadian life to focus on writing about the hectic, absurd city where he grew up.