Fictional Fetish

With three novels (The Cripple and His Talismans, The Song of Kahunsha and, now, Dahanu Road) and three plays (The Matka King, Bombay Black and My Granny the Goldfish) since 2003, Anosh Irani is demonstrably not a victim of writers’ block.

By any measure of varying commercial (sales in Canada, India and Italy) or critical standards (Governor General nominations, Dora Award wins), he is a successful author. A successful Canadian author, even if he has only been a resident of this country since 1998 and despite the fact that his oeuvre is predominately inspired by or set in his native India.

Much of the critical reception of his work so far—and that, for the record, includes my own responses as a former theatre critic—has focused on the Indian part of this Indo-Canadian success story. He is often praised for tales in which Indian mythology intersects with history and spices fight with excrement for odour supremacy...