Cyrus Mistry on his journey as a playwright over the years

We will begin from the end because if therersquos anything wersquove learnt after a 30minute interview with authorplaywright Cyrus Mistry it is patienceMistry who grew up and lived in Mumbai and now resides in the cool confines of Kodaikanal tells us matteroffactly that he ldquowaitedrdquo And for a very long time This was when he was in his 20smdasha time when his mind was singlemindedly focussed on becoming a playwright and the validation came sooner than he had expectedIn 1978 Mistry bagged the Sultan Padamsee Award for Playwriting for his now masterpiece Doongaji House which explores the travails of a Parsi family once glowing in affluence and living in a dilapidated building in Dhobi Talao The troubled protagonists the ldquonearly 70 slight of buildrdquo patriarch Hormusji and his wife Piroja who dwell and seethe over their losses of fortune family and love depicted a maturity that was unusual especially because they were the creation of a firsttime 21yearold writer Mistryrsquos win was no mean feat The competition had been sponsored by the renowned Theatre Group of Bombay and was considered prestigious soliciting entries from both NRI and Indian playwrights ldquoThe cash reward of R5000 might seem insignificant today but back then it was quite a lot of moneyrdquo he says over a phone call If anything the award allayed Mistryrsquos doubts about his choice of career ldquoTo be honest it was the only choice I really had because it was the only thing I knew I was good atrdquo he confesses Reluctant at first to join the rat race Mistry gave it a try with short sixmonth stints at The Indian Express and the Debonair magazine ldquoBut the win made me confident about being able to write more playsrdquo He quit his job and began freelancing to support himselfIn the introduction of his new collection of plays published by Aleph Book Company and which gets its title from his firstever play we however learn that Mistry was forced to wait inordinately before he could bring out more plays ldquoWith no practical experience in theatre I needed to find out if my play could breathe and come alive on stagerdquo he shares in the book ldquoBut the worthies of Theatre Group procrastinated Until one day the truth was stated more bluntly at a committee meeting to which I had been summoned lsquoWe find this play commercially unviablersquo I was told lsquoWe can produce it only if you as playwright undertake to raise R1 lakh in advertising revenue to support the productionrdquoThe play was finally produced by Toni Patel of Stage Two in 1990 Mistry wrote his second play The Legacy of Rage only in 1992 14 years after his first ldquoI felt unreasonably perhaps that until you can see your work put up on stage and hear the lines and decide how you would like to write your next play it would be difficult to get onrdquo he tells us now ldquoI suppose there are plays which do very well but I never wrote those kind of plays myself What I wrote suffered these long years of waitingrdquoThe two plays and a third A Flowering of Disorder previously unpublished and unstaged which offers a glimpse into a middleclass Parsi family struggling to cope in the burgeoning Mumbai metropolis and which he wrote as recently as eight years ago are part of his new collection ldquoIt was my idea to get them published Two of these plays have come out in two or three different editions but separately I thought it would be a good idea to have them all including the new one together in one volumerdquo he saysSome of Mistryrsquos early influences in his playwriting journey were Russian writer Anton Chekhov and Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen whose celebrated threeact play A Dollrsquos House 1879 continues to be part of the induction lesson for any dramatist The inspiration for Mistryrsquos stories often came from home and his Parsi lineage they were subjects he knew intimately ldquoI guess every writer uses his environment and his experiences as his raw material for his work There is a fair amount of autobiographical context in Doongaji House which is from my familyrsquos pastrdquo But picking up these biographical details is simply not enough he says ldquoOne has to work it all in and it has to be transformed in the process Somehow that transformation has to happen for it to acquire the status of art and be accepted as a literary creationrdquo While his IndianCanadian writer brother Rohinton Mistry grappled with similar tropes of Bombay and being Parsi in longform penning awardwinning fictionmdashFamily Matters A Fine Balance and Booker shortlist Such a Long JourneymdashMistry at least initially resisted the form More because he wanted to play to his strengths ldquoI had a feeling for being able to write dialoguesrdquo he says of why he wanted to become a playwright instead ldquoTo catch the nuances of colloquial speech or to sort of capture the rhythms and sounds of the vernacular in English came to me more easily on the other hand I found writing a piece of prose to be quiet gruellingrdquoUnfortunately the city then and even now he suspects hasnrsquot been able to create a thriving ecosystem for those who enjoy writing a good drama for stage ldquoIn any profession you need it to be financially viable to give you that incentive to go onrdquo As a playwright he barely had any His second play The Legacy of Rage which looked at a dysfunctional East Indian family in Mumbai squabbling over their inheritance was produced and directed by Joy Fernandes and enjoyed a weekrsquos run at a Bandra theatre It was a great production but there was no money in it for him he shares ldquoI suppose you need a philanthropist or the government to give grants for productions of plays I donrsquot know what else one can dordquoItrsquos around then that he contemplated writing a novel ldquoIf you publish a novel you hope of getting paid something With plays there is no such provisionrdquo he says ldquoBut I had this dread about writing one I had even made notes for it which were sitting with me for 20 years but I never bothered attempting It was only after my illness a physical ailment that compelled him to leave Mumbai and move to Kodaikanal that I felt that it was time to do somethingrdquoHe made his debut as a novelist in 2005 when he was in his 40s with The Radiance of Ashes which was published by Picador UK Mistry has since gone on to write three others In 2014 he won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for Chronicle of a Corpse BearerTheatre however still rules his heart He tells us never to underestimate the power of dialogues ldquoThey matter a great dealrdquo he says ldquoOne could write a whole novel entirely in dialogue form The spoken word is able to capture the whole essence of a character It is a very compressed form of writing in the way that poems are compressed ldquoHe however is still unsure about how he has evolved between his first play and the last ldquoI havenrsquot really examined thatrdquo he confesses ldquoBut in a sense I feel the first which I wrote at 21 was more effective Because when you are young you are full of energy and vision this is difficult to replicate later But maybe what I am saying is not really true My most recent A Flowering of Disorder hasnrsquot been produced yet for me to be confident about itrdquo