IRANI’S FICTION INFORMED BY UNSETTLING REALITIES
Gritty district in Mumbai provides backdrop to latest novel
Advertisers rely on “exotic” as shorthand for a safe and palatable unknown. “A destination awash in exotic flavours, colours, and music” could be posted on any cruise ship website to promote an excursion to a tropical port’s souvenir market.
North Vancouver’s Anosh Irani isn’t selling vacation dreams. He’s depicting a hard, nightmarish existence. As a result, the exoticism of his arresting fourth novel, The Parcel, is nowhere near pleasant and benign. A searing, disturbing, and intimate portrait of Kamathipura, a dilapidated series of laneways in India’s finance capital where an ugly system of prostitution has thrived for over a century, his novel exposes a heartbreaking reality.
Irani focuses the story on Madhu. A lonesome middle-aged beggar “born and brewed to mortify,” her decades as a prostitute are now memories. So too her days as an effeminate boy who shamed his parents. A pariah troubled by recollections, Madhu’s also increasingly distressed by the latest task assigned by her gurumai. A kind of mother-figure and boss who runs the brothel where Madhu still sleeps, this gurumai was instrumental in Madhu’s literally bloody DIY transition from boy to hijra girl.
Madhu’s assignment is to prepare “a parcel for opening.” The parcel in question: a preteen girl sold in Nepal and transported to the brothel. Madhu’s specialty — which mixes psychological tor- ment, School of Hard Knocks lectures, and opium — will pummel the child until she’s a disposable cog in the Kamathipura machine.
Although Madhu is experience-hardened, her compassion refuses to die. As The Parcel unfolds, that light alters the course of Kamathipura’s history.
Irani has long been fascinated by the notorious and rapidly-changing district. “I grew up opposite the red light district,” he says. “For almost a decade, I thought of writing a novel about a hijra in Kamathipura, but I just wasn’t ready. A few years ago, on a trip to Bombay, I saw that the district was dissolving, slowly morphing into something else. That was my entry point.”
Scooping up Kamathipura addresses, developers are permanently altering the district. To Irani the change is nominal. “I, for one, cannot lament the loss of the red light district,” he says, seeing that as a form of misdirected nostalgia for the ‘Old Bombay.’ “It is a place of horror. However, the problem is that other areas will start decaying as the sex trade moves to the suburbs. So historically — with respect to injustice and inhumanity — nothing changes. In that respect, Old Bombay and New Mumbai are the same.”
To build Madhu’s world Irani realized he needed more than his memories alone: “I spoke to people who frequented the red light district as customers. I interviewed sex workers, real estate developers, pimps, people who owned businesses in the area; all this gave me an insight into their memories, and the way they thought and spoke.”
As for creating the voice of Madhu, Irani proceeded cautiously. “As a writer, I really don’t think I can speak for anyone. All I can do is try and find the humanity in the characters. But yes, I had to be very aware of the fact that my experiences are very different from the characters I was writing about. So the research had to be solid….
“I wrote the first draft without formally interviewing anyone from the hijra community because I did not want to follow a specific individual narrative. After a couple of drafts, I was fortunate enough to interview a transgender sex worker, and that enabled me to go deeper into the psychology of the main character. I also read government surveys, NGO reports, non- fiction articles; sometimes all I did was study photographs of hijras because photographs can reveal so much about a person’s mood and internal world without necessarily explaining their narrative.”
Irani explains that research alone didn’t result in Madhu’s character. Imagination became crucial: “She just showed up one day ready to unleash herself. It was as if this soul had all this venom and heartache coiled up inside her and it just came out like hot lava, but with her pain was a desire to make things right, to do some good. The inspiration is the very spirit of the hijras that I observed and met. One can view them as broken souls, but they have this amazing ability to keep going, and in that sense are fuller, more alive than anyone else.”
And, in the face of devastating circumstances, her distinct nobility emerged as well.
“My first draft is always about finding the main character’s wound,” Irani remarks, “In progressive drafts, the wound becomes more and more acute, and the stakes keep on rising. That’s the darkness of the story, the main character’s descent into the vortex. Once I find that, I look for that spark of light, some redemption. But one has to keep it truthful to the world of the story.”
Irani will be appearing at the Vancouver Writers Fest this October. More info at writersfest.bc.ca. Along with Anosh Irani, Brett Josef Grubisic will be reading at the Word festival. His latest novel is From Up River and For One Night Only.