Against the backdrop of a Mughlai eatery, Behind the Moon delves into three men’s migration journeys
Touchstone Theatre presents acclaimed writer Anosh Irani’s play about isolation and brotherhood
Praneet Akilla as Ayub in Behind the Moon. Photo by Chelsey Stuyt
Touchstone Theatre presents Behind the Moon at The Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab from March 27 to April 6
AWARD-WINNING PLAYWRIGHT and author Anosh Irani was born and raised in South Mumbai, close to a bustling place called Mohammed Ali Road.
Located in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood, the road is well known for its street food and Mughlai restaurants, which serve up aromatic, indulgent, and warmly spiced dishes that trace their roots back to the Mughal Empire. Staples of the cuisine range from fragrant biryani variations made of layered basmati rice to juicy minced-lamb kebabs, to malai kofta, fried potato-paneer balls served in a silky tomato-based curry sauce.
Irani moved to Canada as a young adult in 1998—but the memory of riding his motorcycle along Mohammed Ali Road and observing daily life there stuck with him. Many of the characters in his plays and short stories are from the area, including Ayub, the central figure in his latest production, Behind the Moon.
“It’s a tough neighbourhood, but it’s also very stimulating,” the writer tells Stir by phone. “During certain festivals, the food and the music is a very specific part of the city that I’m interested in. So I think when I moved to Canada, there were certain localities, certain areas, certain spaces that I brought with me. I guess they were contained in my body and I didn’t even realize.”
Behind the Moon premiered at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 2023 and ran a second time at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria last month. Touchstone Theatre will present the work here in Vancouver at The Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab from March 27 to April 6.
The play is set in a Mughlai eatery in Toronto called the Mughlai Moon, where its lone employee Ayub works hard to please the owner, Qadir Bhai. But when a cab driver named Jalal walks into the restaurant one evening hoping for a late-night meal, Ayub’s world is thrown off-kilter as a complicated friendship develops. All three characters immigrated to Canada from India, which lays the groundwork for Irani to explore themes of isolation, connection, and brotherhood within the migration experience.
Ayub is based on another character of Irani’s named Abdul from his production The Men in White, which premiered at the Arts Club Theatre Company in 2017. Though Abdul was not a main character in that work, his role included a small monologue about the restaurant he worked in, and his backstory continued to fascinate Irani long after the play was over. So he explored the character further by writing a short story about his life called “Behind the Moon”, which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“I thought, ‘Okay, this was good. I needed to explore a life more, and now I’m done with this character,’” Irani recalls. “But obviously the character was not done with me, because I kept thinking about him even more.”
Anosh Irani. Photo by Boman Irani
In 2023, Irani received the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award for his body of work. His most recent novel, The Parcel, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In the realm of theatre, his play Bombay Black—which is about a woman who sells erotic dances to wealthy men in Mumbai—earned five Dora Mavor Moore Awards, including one for outstanding new play.
Irani got the idea to incorporate a cab driver into Behind the Moon from another real-life experience. He was sitting in a Mughlai restaurant in Toronto one evening, staring out the window, when he noticed a couple of taxis parked on the street. He immediately began to make notes on physical descriptions, imagining how one of the cabbies might walk into the eatery after closing time and encounter Ayub, striking up a conversation and then developing a much-needed bond.
“Especially for people who move from a country to another country, the first thing we miss is those deep friendships that we had back home,” Irani reflects. “I always say that in a city like Bombay, even when you go to sleep alone at home, you still go to sleep to the community, and you wake up as a community.”
Having immigrated to Canada from India himself, Irani adds that many of the themes in Behind the Moon are pulled from a deeply personal place.
“I’ve heard many people say ‘We came here in search of a better life,’ whether it’s the U.S. or Canada or any other country,” he says. “And over the years I’ve asked myself, ‘What is a better life? What does that mean?’ I think that’s one of the things that we explore in Behind the Moon that’s never mentioned. The play emerges from that question and the notion of our dreams, our desires, our ambitions. Do we question them enough? And do we have the right lens through which we view our own dreams and desires?”
Behind the Moon is directed by Touchstone Theatre’s artistic director Lois Anderson. She has collaborated with Irani on a number of plays in the past, including My Granny the Goldfish, Buffoon, and Transcendence. The upcoming work will star Praneet Akilla as Ayub, Zahf Paroo as Jalal, and Dhirendra as Qadir Bhai.
In the same way that Ayub refused to leave Irani’s mind all those years ago, Irani hopes that his characters and their struggles stick with audiences long after the curtains close.
“Coming to Vancouver was a very isolating experience for me,” Irani says. “The vast, open space that I saw was actually quite oppressive for me, strangely. But what it did was it made me read and it made me write. It made me go deeply internal. So I think that balance has really shaped me as a writer. Then, of course, you know, the more I live here, it’s not about longing or nostalgia for the past. I don’t write out of nostalgia. I write out of disturbance—the things that trouble me or create some kind of turbulence. I’d like to transfer that to the reader or the viewer.” 
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