Characters face tensions threatening to explode
One might assume that the Anosh Irani who appears in the title story of his new collection, Translated from the Gibberish: Seven Stories and One Half Truth, is the real Anosh Irani. Although the story, which is split into two bookending sections, features a writer named Anosh Irani who moves from Mumbai (which he calls Bombay throughout) to Vancouver, it is not a memoir. If the “half truth” in the title isn’t a clue, a scan of a boarding pass from “Bombay to Outer Space” is a giveaway.
“I wouldn’t say it’s autobiographical, but it’s definitely deeply, deeply personal,” says Irani, the author of four bestselling novels and several plays that illuminate the experiences of those living within the Indian diaspora. “What is most accurate for me is this idea of ‘gibberish’ and the fact that immigrants speak in fragments. There’s a whole conversation that you have in your head.”
Told through a series of lyrical meditations — interspersed with some sharply funny but dark moments involving a pair of tattered underwear hanging off a nearby balcony — Irani observes how immigrants can feel both untethered and trapped at the same time. His character cannot sleep, kept awake by his internal musings over this back and forth between continents and cultures, and the tenuous concept of home. Nights, he decides, are for translating the gibberish.
Twenty years ago, the “real” Anosh Irani left what is now Mumbai for Vancouver, seeking a new life as a writer. He had made a promise to himself to not return home for a visit until he reached a certain level of artistic success — a goal Irani now considers a youthful quest.
“I don’t set goals (now) because, to be honest, life doesn’t really care in that sense what we decide or what we hope will happen,” he says. He was 24 when he first moved.
During his first few years in Vancouver, Irani dedicated himself solely to his craft. “The isolation that I experienced was terrifying,” he says. “But it was also a gift because that’s exactly what I needed to learn how to write.”
Being alone in a new country provided Irani with the outsider perspective and discipline he needed to become the acclaimed writer he is today. Despite the physical vastness of his new country, he felt claustrophobic. It makes for terrible day-to-day living, but a powerful tool for creating art.
“It was like being in a pressure cooker, even though Canada has so much space,” says Irani.
The characters in Translated from the Gibberish’s other six stories also face tensions that threaten to explode. In the funny but melancholic “Swimming Coach,” a man attempts to recreate the famous swimming-pool hop from John Cheever’s classic American story, “The Swimmer.” This was the first piece in the collection that Irani wrote, well before he even knew what exactly this project would become.
Irani was in Mumbai, looking at his bookshelves — even when he’s not writing, he’s thinking about it — and decided to reread Cheever’s story. While Cheever’s suburban protagonist finds endless places to dive, there are few pools in Mumbai for Irani’s character.
“What happens to a man wearing a Speedo walking around in the underbelly of Bombay, surrounded by criminals and people who have no patience for that? Why would someone do that?” The answer, Irani, reveals is that this man is trying to find his way home.
For some of Irani’s protagonists, home equals love, not a physical place.
“There’s pressure, unpredictability, and again that sense of claustrophobia for various reasons. Either grief or rejection, or the inability to make sense as an immigrant,” Irani says. “They’re all just trying to move. They’re very uncomfortable wherever they are.”
In November, Irani’s one-man play, Buffoon, about a clown seeking love, premieres at the Tarragon Theatre. He’s been travelling quite a bit to Toronto for workshopping. He also travels to India once a year and is fond of New York, which he says shares the same energy and density as Mumbai. When asked if he would ever consider moving there, Irani muses, perhaps for work, but never permanently. He says, “I don’t think there is any one place where I can live for the rest of my life.”