‘In constant state of imbalance, city a fertile riverbed of stories’

MUMBAI: Anosh Irani spent his early years walking past Kamathipura as a boy living in Retreat Compound on Bellasis Road. Three decades later, his observations found their way into his book, set in the city’s red-light district.
Among Canada’s most promising writers, Irani, 42, who lives in Vancouver, was in Mumbai recently for the launch of his novel, The Parcel (HarperCollins), which tells the story of Madhu, a transgender sex worker entrusted with ‘the parcel’, a minor trafficked from Nepal into Mumbai to a life of sex slavery.Their relationship unfolds in a city seeing urban development metastasise as highrises take over spaces where mangroves and mills used to be.
Irani explains it was during his visits to Mumbai over the last decade that he began noticing the shift in physicality. “Like other areas, Kamathipura was witnessing redevelopment and many brothels were disappearing. That was my point of entry for the story. My protagonist was a 40-year-old transgender sex worker grappling with the fear of age taking over her body, as the physical environment she lives in is also being demolished,” Irani says.
The book takes you on a walk with Madhu and places you at her many crossroads. It splits open the life of a community doubly marginalized as ‘hijras’ in the sex trade—a truth Irani was made to realize in course of interactions with pimps, sex workers and NGO volunteers in the area.
And while a hurried plot twist sees Madhu take unexpected action to confront her frailties, Irani puts down her haste as deliberate. “Real life decisions are made in an instant. If we trace anything that has required deep, intrinsic change, it has happened in one incisive moment,” he explains. A finalist for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, The Parcel is the fourth of Irani’s novels that borrows distinct Mumbai tropes.
His first, ‘The Cripple and His Talismans,’ used magic realism to tell the story of an amputee who combs the city in search of his limbs. ‘The Song of Kahunsha’ described the life of an abandoned child in the city exploring the urban wilderness in search of his father. ‘Dahanu Road’, shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, narrated the turbulent love story of a Warli woman and the son of an Irani chikoo farm owner in Dahanu, located on Mumbai’s outskirts and historically known for its chikoo plantations.
A teacher of creative writing for the stage at Simon Frazer University in British Columbia, he has also won the Dora award by the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts for his play, ‘Bombay Black’.
Explaining his penchant for using the same canvas, Irani describes the city as a fertile riverbed of stories. “Mumbai is in a constant state of imbalance from which emerge characters whose motivations need to be explained,” he says. Mumbai is also in many ways what the writer describes Madhu as: “Reviled and revered, deemed to have been blessed and cursed, with sacred powers”.