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Playwright Anosh Irani ponders the true meaning of a better life in "Behind the Moon"
"I don’t really like the idea of redemption in plays or stories."
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In what’s a recurring motif in his work, Anosh Irani’s Behind the Moon is set in a space where there is no room for the main characters to hide. That’s entirely by design.
“I don’t like opening it up too much,” the relentlessly thoughtful playwright says, speaking to the Straight on Zoom from his North Vancouver home. “I want them to be in a confined container, and then essentially turn on the heat and let them boil. Whether it’s a restaurant or the locker room of a cricket club, or it’s the chicken slaughterhouse or a brothel, I’m always looking to find the container.”
In Behind the Moon the container in question is a tiny Mughlai eatery in Toronto. Named Mughlai Moon, the restaurant has a single employee, Ayub (Praneet Akilla), who both cooks and cleans for the owner Qadir Bhai (Dhirendra). While he works tirelessly, there’s a lot going on inside, starting with desperately missing his family in Mumbai, whom he dreams of reuniting with. Things get complicated when a cab driver named Jalal (Zahf Paroo) stops into the restaurant, with a growing friendship between the two causing Ayub to rethink the world that he finds himself living in.
Irani knows what it’s like to feel like a stranger in a strange land. In the ’90s he was making a good living in India working in the advertising world and happy in Mumbai—a city which he still loves and returns to each year. Pulling up roots for Canada was exciting, mostly because he had dreams of being a writer, which led him to creative writing classes at UBC. While Irani quickly excelled—within five years he had his first play produced (The Matka King) and book published (The Cripple and His Talismans)—there was also a cost that, in some ways, continues to be a part of life today.
“I moved here in ’98 as a student and after a few months or maybe a year or so, I understood what homesickness was,” he recalls. “I kind of actually felt it physically in the body. And my desire to go back, I would say, has increased with time. There are many people I know where, once they make the move, that homesickness gradually dissipates. For me it hasn’t—maybe it has been the fact that I’m a writer and India provides material. But it’s not just that—I have a very strong connection.”
Anosh IraniBoman Irani.Behind the Moon explores the reality that moving to another country—especially one with a radically different culture—can be complicated. It’s no accident that the story is set in Toronto, where culture shock for many immigrants starts with the weather in winter. From there, he wonders what exactly Ayub is looking for, noting that he doesn’t fully understand the motivations of his characters until their stories have been fully written.
“I’ve always heard through the years people saying, maybe in an interview or in something said to me personally, ‘We came here in search of a better life,’ ” he says. “And my question is ‘What is a better life? What does that mean?’ I’ve always wondered—even with respect to me, even though I’ve done well here and I’ve been fortunate—‘Is this a better life? What would my life have been if I had stayed back?’
"That’s the dilemma that some people have, and many don’t," Irani continues. "For me, it’s always these two parallel sort of rivers running alongside each other. One is ‘Where am I right now?, but I’m saying ‘What would that have been?’ And in a way that plays into the investigation of how we don’t question our dreams and our ambitions.
For Ayub, a new life that once seemed full of promise ends up taking a serious toll on his mental health. A version of the character first appeared in Irani’s play The Men In White, sticking with the playwright enough that he wrote an expanded version of him in a Los Angeles Review of Books short story titled "Behind the Moon".
The more time he spent fleshing out Ayub, the more he continued to learn about himself and his own journey.
“I keep using this word ‘interiology’, ” Irani says. “I think that’s the purpose of all art for me. It helps imagine someone’s life. I write about the things that disturb me, and I sort of then fine-tune that disturbance. That releases it and unleashes it onto the audience. And I hope that they are both moved and slightly disturbed by what they see.”
“You have the Canadian dream,” he continues, “or the American dream or the Australian dream, or whatever it is. But when we get there, what do we confront? This is what I realized I was exploring.”
The cast of Behind the Moon (clockwise from top): Praneet Akilla, Dhirendra, and Zahf Paroo.Chelsey Stuyt.The result isn’t exactly, Irani acknowledges, a traditional feel-good story. That hasn’t stopped Behind the Moon from resonating with audiences since it was first mounted in Toronto in 2023.
“I love being in a theatre where people have a very visceral response to a show,” he says. “Where there’s genuine emotion as opposed to, ‘Oh, that was an intellectual sort of exercise.’ I’m not interested in being clever. And so that kind of visceral response is what I have been getting from the audience and what I continue to hope for—that they are part of an experience. I’m not providing answers. I’m just helping them stay in an experience. Hopefully when they go home, Ayub will haunt them. Jalal will haunt them, and Bhai will haunt them the way they haunted me.”
And if that’s the case, he knows he’s done his job as an artist: getting into a space where there’s nowhere to hide, and then turning up the heat. And while he notes that the characters in Behind the Moon are in undeniable pain, he assures audiences there is humour to balance things out.
“Coming from Bombay, and even my family, humour was always present,” he says. “Dark, strange, macabre humour, that existed, no matter what happened.”
If things don’t always turn out completely sunshine and Mumbai sweets, that’s kind of like life, where not every dream comes true. Sometimes the journey is just as important as where you end up.
“I’m not a huge believer in redemption. I don’t really like the idea of redemption in plays or stories,” Irani says. “We hear it a lot in film: how does this character redeem himself? Sometimes in life we can’t redeem ourselves. Something has happened and no matter what we try to do, we can never undo it. My journey is more and more interested in what is a character’s arc from pain to healing. If we are in pain, we are reaching for something that will release us from that pain. And what does healing look like? Is it possible for someone like Ayub and Jalal and Kadir? These are the questions.”
Behind the Moon plays the Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab from March 27 to April 6.
