The Bombay Plays

By Anosh Irani

From renowned author Anosh Irani comes an updated edition of The Bombay Plays featuring two plays that explore the depths of the back alleys of Bombay. Winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play Finalist for the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama

In The Matka King—a story that pits human nature against love and chance—a landscape of betrayal and redemption comes to life in the red-light district of Bombay, India. One very powerful eunuch, Top Rani, operates an illicit lottery through his brothel, and when a gambler who is deeply in debt makes an unexpected wager, the stakes become life and death.

Bombay Black—winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play—tells the story of Apsara, Bombay’s most infamous dancer, who lives with her iron-willed mother, Padma, in an apartment by the sea. Padma takes money from men so they can watch her daughter perform a mesmerizing dance. When a mysterious blind man named Kamal visits for a private dance, his secret link to their past threatens to change each of their lives forever. At turns lyrical and brutal, Bombay Black charts the seduction of Apsara by Kamal, and Padma’s violent enmity towards the blind man and the secret he holds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: May 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781770917682

Anosh Irani

ANOSH IRANI has published four critically acclaimed novels: The Cripple and His Talismans (2004), a national bestseller; The Song of Kahunsha (2006), which was an international bestseller and shortlisted for Canada Reads and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; Dahanu Road (2010), which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize; and The Parcel (2016), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His play Bombay Black (2006) won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play, and his anthology The Bombay Plays: The Matka King & Bombay Black (2006) and his play Men in White were both shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. Buffoon, his latest work of drama, was critically acclaimed and won two Dora Mavor Moore Awards, for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role. He lives in Vancouver.

Book preview

Cover: The Bombay Plays: The Matka King Bombay Black by Anosh Irani, Winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play, “Sensuous, lyrical, mysterious, sordid, grotesque, romantic and highly emblematic.”, —The Globe and Mail. Logo: Finalist GG 80.

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

The Bombay Plays

The Matka King

Bombay Black

Anosh Irani

Playwrights Canada Press Toronto

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.