Ankita Singh describes her new play, Basmati Bitch, as morally grey. The flawed female lead characters "aren't meant to be good". Photo / Dean Purcell
Joanna Wane talks to fight club fan Ankita Singh about badass women and her new neo-noir action comedy Basmati Bitch
Even as a kid, Ankita Singh had a sneaking suspicion she might just be one of the coolest people in the room, despite — or possibly because — she was definitely one of the weirdest.
Picture her as the 7-year-old girl who turned up at primary school in Hamilton, a super-introverted super-nerd fresh off the boat from India, still learning to read and write Hindi, let alone English. “I had glasses. I was really overweight. I had big, bouffy hair. I’d put my feet over my head, and draw all the time,” she says.
“Yeah, I was just a weirdo. I was begging to get bullied. So, obviously, I got bullied by everyone. The South Asians, the white people, the people of colour. I was really into anime and fantasy because real life was so depressing.
“But this is the thing, I never felt ashamed of being Indian, because I was getting bullied for just being kind of weird. And I don’t know … I have a bit of an ego. I was like, ‘They’re the problem.’”
Then, in Year 9, Singh gave an “inappropriate” speech about mum jokes that made everyone laugh. That earned her some street cred. Humour became her defence mechanism, as it often does for smart, misfit kids. By the time she left school, she was the undisputed queen of slay comebacks. All the bullies had dropped out by then, anyway, and her struggle for acceptance was playing out closer to home.
Singh had picked up drama in Year 12 without telling her parents, who wouldn’t let her study art or apply for film school. Comedian Pax Assadi, a fellow first-gen Kiwi whose Iranian father and Pakistani mother came to New Zealand as refugees, went to the same high school and has a similar backstory. When Assadi told his parents he was going to be a stand-up comedian, they cried.
“I understand, as an adult, that my family sacrificed everything and wanted me to have a stable life, but as a teenager, you’re like, ‘Screw you, Mom!’” says Singh, who talks with a strangely American accent she blames on the hours spent watching dubbed anime and episodes of Friends. “My [older] brother’s a chartered accountant. He didn’t pave the way for me at all. But the people I met [through drama] and the fact that I got to be on stage — to be someone else — was life-changing for me.”
Now 27, with a background in producing and a master’s degree in screenwriting she completed in lockdown, Singh is about to open her first play, Basmati Bitch, at Auckland’s Q Theatre. Bookings have been so strong for the “neo-noir action/crime comedy” that its run has already been extended by a week.
Incredibly, it’s the first time a South Asian woman has been commissioned to write a full-length play in New Zealand. And, like last year’s brilliant season of Nathan Joe’s Scenes from a Yellow Peril (another Auckland Theatre Company production), there’s nothing reverential or well-behaved about it. “It’s a kind of a power fantasy for South Asian women,” she says. “For all women, really. It feels good to be bad, sometimes. It feels really f***ing good.”
The story’s setting is a neon-lit, dystopian future beyond the tipping point for climate change. Global trade wars have created a black market for rice and New Zealand — plagued by constant monsoon-like rains — is in the grip of a totalitarian government.
Despite some gritty underlying themes (people smuggling, exploited migrant workers, the collapse of society), Basmati Bitch is a crime caper at heart, with choreographed stage combat and a pan-Asian ensemble cast playing multiple roles. Shiva and Bisma, the lead female characters, are flawed antiheroes. During early table reads, even the actors were shocked by some of the plot twists. “It’s meant to be morally grey,” Singh says, with a shrug. “They’re not supposed to be good.”
The main action takes place in a shady bar called the Dragon’s Dojo, owned by a “basmati baron”, which doubles as an illegal fight club. Shiva is an MMA fighter with a dark past; Bisma is a repressed office worker who gets turned on by seeing Shiva’s power unleashed. “It sort of unlocks this hunger in her,” explains Singh, who spent three years training at a Muay Thai boxing gym when she was at university and loved going to watch fights.
“Both Shiva and Bisma are misfits. Unapologetically misfits. I was always a misfit too, I guess, and I liked that. I never tried to fit in. I was obsessed with anime before it was cool. I was obsessed with K-pop before it was cool. And I was never ashamed of being Indian. I was always really into my culture. So with my work, it’s not ‘This is me accepting myself.’ I just want them to have fun doing things they wouldn’t normally get to do as Asian actors, without having to justify their existence or identity.”
It’s day two of rehearsals and stage combat instructors are working with the cast to block fight scenes. At least one of them involves a knife.
“He’s going to come in with a kingmaker,” the lead trainer tells Gemma-Jayde Naidoo, who plays Shiva and is about to be attacked in slow motion by a man swinging a heavy yellow flashlight at her head. She spins and parries, disabling him with an elbow strike before bringing him to the floor in a sleeper hold and dumping his unconscious body. “Bang! Bang! Bong!” goes the trainer, as she moves through the sequence. “Nice.”
Watching from the sidelines is director Ahi Karunaharan, who’s lying under a table, stretched out on the floor. It’s useful to see things from a different perspective sometimes, he says, showing me a model of the split-level set design. How the constant rainfall in the world of the play will be depicted has yet to be decided. To Karunaharan, the fight sequences are the beats of the show, like the big numbers in musical theatre. Eight minutes of combat in total and Shiva is in all of them.
Across the rehearsal room, a scene list has been taped to the wall: The Drowning Dragon. The Rice Heist. The Takedown. F*** F***F*** (that’s scene 13). Guy Ritchie’s crime-comedy Snatch is one of the films Singh has referenced as a guide to the tone of Basmati Bitch, with its deadpan, ironic humour. Karunaharan describes it as a love letter to fans of action comedies and genre-based heists, with a nod to Korean soap operas and cosmic coincidences that are “so Bollywood”.
Born in the UK and of Sri Lankan Tamil descent, Karunaharan moved to New Zealand with his family in the early 90s. A Toi Whakaari graduate, he was working at Auckland’s Basement Theatre when Singh began an internship across the way with Indian Ink. It was a pivotal moment for both of them. “I’ve been so alone in the sector,” he says. “When I saw Ankita, I thought, ‘Who is this unicorn?’”
It was Karunaharan who gave Singh her first gig, convincing her to produce First World Problems, a platform he curated for emerging South Asian writers. Since then, they’ve collaborated on a number of projects and Singh sees him as a mentor. But while much of Karunaharan’s work is about the past and the journey people have made to get here, he says Singh is constantly thinking about how to push the narrative forward. “She’s her own genre, a very smart maker creating content for her generation and [a framework] for what she wants to say.”
A very early draft of Basmati Bitch, originally conceived as a web series, had been workshopped four or five years ago and then set aside while Singh picked up producing work, including I Am Rachel Chu for Nathan Joe.
In 2019, burnt out and barely making ends meet, she applied for a marketing internship with the CJ Group in South Korea. An international conglomerate based in Seoul, its entertainment branch produced Parasite, the first non English-language film to win an Oscar for Best Picture. But when whispers began about a virus circulating in China, she began reconsidering her options.
A fortnight after she flew home to start classes in AUT’s master of screenwriting programme, New Zealand went into lockdown. “It was actually perfect because most of the course is just writing and you need space for that,” she says. “It was a complete shutdown of any social responsibilities, no distractions, and I had the best time ever. Thank God for Covid relief. That grant, and my student loan, is how I managed to survive.”
Last year, Singh spent three months on a writer’s retreat in India, shaping Basmati Bitch into a play — the first time she’d been back to her birth country in 12 years. Visiting the Taj Mahal with her film-make partner Calvin Sang was mind-blowing, she says. “I can see why it’s a wonder of the world. I was like, ‘If you don’t do this for me when I die, I’ll come back and haunt you.’”
She’s still keen to turn Basmati Bitch into a web series, which is how she first visualised it. For now, though, other projects are piling up. She and Sang have just finished making an episode for a motherhood anthology, which will be screened on TVNZ. A supernatural rom-com about a nerdy Indian girl, loosely based on her life, is on its third draft. She’s also developing a martial arts-inspired animated series after winning a $10,000 funding injection from Taika Waititi’s production company, Piki Films.
A talented illustrator who’s dabbled in graphic design and photography, Singh seems to have found her creative home as a writer, although she’d like to polish her drawing skills and make a graphic novel or video game one day. (Her acting career peaked at school when she was a tree in Midsummer Night’s Dream and one of the other trees fainted. They all heard the thud, but no one broke character.)
“I love being in a writer’s room with other people because it’s philosophy and politics and creativity and I get so fired up,” she says. “Jacob [Rajan from Indian Ink] used to say that when you get people laughing, you open their hearts and then you can slip something serious in.
“Humour disarms people. That’s when you can actually change their opinions and make them feel something or become more accepting of things. I don’t know if I’ve achieved that, but that’s what I’m trying to do.”
If you need a break from the slopes or don’t fancy a ski, there’s still a lot to do this.