Nearly twenty years after she first imagined an 11-year-old girl living under a bridge in Kolkata and dreaming of school, Anusree Roy found that girl speaking to her once again. Older, now a mother, she was determined not to be silenced.
That girl is Chaya, the protagonist of Roy’s acclaimed debut play Pyaasa (Hindi for “thirst) – and her new play Through the Eyes of God. This was not an intentional return. “I wrote my first play, Pyaasa, 20 years ago,” Roy explains. “That play has lived within me for almost two decades, and I have never thought about writing a sequel.” Instead, she experienced “the rumblings of a new play,” and made a slow, deliberate commitment to writing. “It was only when I was in the heart of writing Through the Eyes of God that I realized that this is Chaya, the lead character from Pyaasa’s story. That little girl I created in Pyaasa wants to be heard again. It was such a thunderbolt revelation for me.”
The play
Premiering now at Theatre Passe Muraille, Through the Eyes of God returns audiences to Chaya’s world in Kolkata with unsparing, unflinching clarity. Chaya is now a young woman and a mother of an 11-year old daughter named Krishna who is part of a group of child beggars at the Daskhinapan shopping complex. When Krishna is trafficked to Delhi, Chaya undertakes a relentless journey through the underbelly of systems that are indifferent at best and predatory at worst. The stakes are brutal, but Roy resists spectacle. The play’s power comes from its intimacy… the way a desperate mother’s love sharpens every choice, and survival narrows the field of what is possible.
For Roy, maternal love is not an abstract writerly theme: it is a power lived, felt and inherited. “I was raised by incredible and complex women who loved me fiercely and would sacrifice anything to protect and care for me,” Roy explains. Drawing from that experience, she understood Chaya’s trajectory instinctively. “I knew she would end up being a mother, much like her mother Meera did the best she could to raise her. So Chaya does the best she can to raise her daughter Krishna.” The echoes between generations are intentional: care is devotion, and care is burden, with no time for sentiment.
As the play moves into the terrain of trafficking and systemic corruption, where seemingly everyone is on the take, Roy remains clear about her approach. “I do this in all my writing: I write to serve the characters and their story and their journey. I don’t write to make a statement; I write to examine the lengths to which a character would go to get what they want and survive.” Likewise, although the show is set in Kolkata and Delhi, and rooted in a very particular (and for North American audiences, alien) social context, Roy resists the idea of smoothing edges. “I didn’t think about shaping Chaya’s story to ensure it resonated across cultures,” she says. “I think it would be irresponsible of me to do that.” The result is deeply personal and political, but not didactic.
A Governor General’s Award–nominated playwright, Roy is also a film and television writer whose credits include Interview with the Vampire, Transplant, and SkyMed. Currently, she is the commissioned playwright at Tarragon Theatre, where she is writing her new play 147, 8th Street. She is also developing a feature film inspired by her audio play Sisters, and directing and premiering her short films The Birthday Party and God’s Plan. Her theatre work — often centred on women navigating caste, class, and survival — has earned multiple Dora Awards and established her as a writer of formidable emotional precision. Across Roy’s body of work, individual lives are never abstracted from the forces that shape them. Her plays consistently trace how history, caste, gender, and power are absorbed into the body, the family, and the most intimate acts. In Sesaya Arts’ review of 2025’s Trident Moon set during the partition of India and Pakistan, Scott Sneddon noted the ability of Roy’s writing to hold sweeping historical trauma in close, emotionally exacting focus.
Through the Eyes of God also marks a continuation of Roy’s long-standing creative partnership with director Thomas Morgan Jones. Rooted in a shared commitment to stories rooted in social justice, their long collaboration — stretching back to Pyaasa, and encompassing multiple productions directed by Jones — has been a consistent creative anchor for Roy’s work on Canadian stages, shaping its production and storytelling across nearly two decades.
The Theatre Passe Muraille production
But the production marks an important shift. Roy herself originated the role of Chaya in Pyaasa, but here she entrusts the character to Gabriella Sundar Singh. The decision was pragmatic, primarily due to “honestly, scheduling,” says Roy. With such a demanding writing and producing slate, performing this run was simply not feasible. Still, the bequest of the role was thoughtful and deliberate. “Both my director Thomas and I have long admired Gabriella’s work, so we invited her into the process right from the workshop stage.”
And that trust is fully rewarded in Sundar Singh’s breathtaking performance. Alone onstage for the entire show, she embodies not only Chaya, but a constellation of other figures in dialogue, including police officials, a street vendor, and even a small child. Each is transformatively realized – and sharply distinguished – through specific shifts in her voice, posture, gait and physical rhythm. The role demands both emotional endurance and technical precision, and Sundar Singh meets it with control, ferocity, and a heart-cracking tenderness, allowing Chaya’s desperation and resolve to accumulate moment by moment. It’s a marvellous performance that refuses simplification, holding the audience in impossibly intimate proximity to a woman navigating impossible choices.
Roy’s keen ear for dialogue creates a striking verisimilitude: the world of the play arrives through language with such specificity that its locations and people take shape instantly. With my personal roots in Kolkata, I could literally see the streets and recognize the rhythms of speech, the characters vivid in my mind’s eye as Sundar Singh breathed them fully into being.
The show’s staging further sharpens that intimacy. There is no conventional set – just a pedestal-like black cube, which is just over three feet high and across, framed by two railings (designed by Jawon Kang). Atop it, a constantly moving Sundar Singh navigates the streets of Kolkata and Delhi, a train platform, and even a moving train. The absence of scenery and the placement of Chaya at eye level demand that the audience meet her performance without mediation. And this immediacy is intensified by lighting design, courtesy of Roy’s other longtime collaborator David DeGrow, and evocative sound design by Romeo Candido. Together, they shape space, motion, and threat around Sundar Singh’s body, transforming that cube into shifting sites of danger, transit, and resignation.
The play asks how a woman in the direst economic and social circumstances can claim power within a system rigged against her: how she can navigate indifference, corruption and grinding poverty in order to protect her child.
What emerges through the brutal gauntlet Chaya runs is her agency — not as triumph, but as action. It provides powerful proof of Roy’s conviction about Through the Eyes of God: “if it’s extremely specific in a human experience, it will become universal.”
Through the Eyes of God runs until February 21, 2026 at Theatre Passe Muraille. Tickets and details are available at passemuraille.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
