For Siddarth Sharma, his door into Rohinton Mistry’s 700-page epic A Fine Balance was a small detail about the family kitchen table. “There’s this moment in the book that reminds me of my childhood,” Sharma notes, before describing how his character Maneck Kohlah comes downstairs each morning to hug his parents, and then his father drinks his tea from a well-used mug. “Even though I just grew up with my mom and my grandma, something about that ritual of waking up and getting excited to do this thing in the morning brought me much closer to Maneck.”
While Mistry’s gripping, multi-award-winning novel traverses such themes as political violence, police brutality, caste disparity and social cruelty, it is such daily minutiae of the lives of ordinary people that cause his characters to haunt readers long after the last page. Sharma keeps returning to this detail — and others — as he prepared to originate the role of Maneck in Crow’s Theatre’s world premiere production, extended multiple times into October due to brisk ticket sales.
A fine adaptation
Adapted by Anosh Irani from Mistry’s 1995 novel and directed by Crow’s Artistic Director Chris Abraham, A Fine Balance is set during India’s 1975 Emergency, the 21-month period of authoritarian rule when then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended democratic freedoms, and the machinery of the state reached far into ordinary lives.
The story follows four strangers of vastly different castes and classes: the widowed Dina Dalal, the sheltered student Maneck (Sharma), and two tailors, Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash Darji. Thrown together in a cramped Bombay apartment, they find in one another an unlikely refuge from the surrounding upheaval.
The production cast includes Husein Madhavji, Anand Rajaram, Zorana Sadiq, Sugith Varughese, and Ben Yoganathan, all working from a stage text that Sharma had the rare privilege of encountering before he ever read the source novel. That order of operations gave Sharma an unusual vantage point on Irani’s astonishing achievement, which he calls an “extension” of Mistry’s world, rather than a compressed retelling. By way of explanation, he says, “Let’s say we saw a scene play out in the book, and then what happened at the other end.” Rather than re-staging these best-known beats of the novel, the play imagines what happens in the margins between them — while still honouring “certain things that you have to get from the book to make sure that the storytelling is intact.”
Of Irani’s command of the material, which was built through years of research and workshopping, Sharma is unequivocal: “He is the book. You can turn to any page, [ask] ‘what happened here?’ and he says,‘This is what happened.’ “
Maneck
In discussing his character Maneck, Sharma resists easy sentiment. He describes a boy raised in the hills in a stable, loving, even “picture perfect” household. His father runs a convenience store, and his mother helps manage the family. That familial empathy and hopefulness turn to rigidity when he is sent first to boarding school, and then into the chaos of Bombay (Mumbai). “When you go to a city like Mumbai, it all falls apart,” Sharma nods, tracing how a boy who once told his parents he would happily become a mechanic, rather than leave home, someone who “took things … to heart and just built his world around it.”
Sharma’s challenge with the role is resisting the temptation to flatten Maneck’s arc into victimhood. Working from the strength of Irani’s writing, he says the job is committing “to the truth of the moment” — particularly in scenes involving Maneck’s activist friend Avinash, whose precarious defiance of the state exposes, by contrast, how insulated Maneck’s own family safety net really is.
“You can’t help but reflect on what that means for you,” Sharma says of playing alongside a character with so much less to fall back on. “You’re fighting for something, and then you realize you’re part of the problem.”
A Late Bloomer
Empathetic discomfort is not new territory for Sharma, who earned a Canadian Screen Award nomination and an ACTRA Toronto Award nomination for his heartrending performance as “The Student”, a young immigrant who works as a food delivery person to make ends meet while pursuing a post-secondary education, on the Crave dramedy Late Bloomer. His arc in the show’s third season is an unforgettable gut punch. Sharma instantly connected to the role. After his adolescence in Chandigarh, Punjab, he and his mother immigrated to Canada in 2012. They worked factory jobs alongside international students and long-tenured immigrant labourers, and later returned briefly to India, before he came back to study at Toronto Film School.
What he had never personally lived was the specific visibility of being a turbaned Sikh newcomer, and he was careful about claiming that experience. Before accepting the part, he called a close friend Sukhwinder to discuss whether the role should go to someone with that lived experience directly. Sukwinder said, “I get it. I know you’re not disrespectful of this culture,” and encouraged him to undertake the role. Sharma was “Thank you for giving me that permission,” an appreciative Sharma said.
The performance that resulted, he says, was built to defy despair. He points to a late moment in the character’s arc, where he tells a friend to keep going, despite everything: “Things are rough, but you know you gotta keep looking up, and stay focused.” Sharma says the line “still gives me goosebumps” because “you don’t want it to seem like, ‘Oh, it’s a tough life only, and it’s just sad.’” Instead, this is somebody who’s facing enormous challenges but has “got so much hope.” After the episode aired, viewers of all backgrounds told him it had changed the way they see delivery and gig workers in their own daily lives — by opening up a space to consider what they might be carrying. “I appreciate the show’s creative team letting me do it,” he smiles.
Live performance
Sharma is transitioning from a screen career that also includes Gen V, Motorheads, The Way Home, and Children Ruin Everything, plus his own directing and producing work through his production company Hold the Sauce Films. “I still don’t feel like a complete performer, and I probably never will,” he admits. “I feel like there’s something missing, which is the stage.”
A Fine Balance is his second time on a live stage — his first was last year’s The Surrogate, in a role that he and his agent pursued deliberately, because “you gotta feel like an artist” beyond the screen work. There is real pressure realizing such an iconic character. “Everybody who’s read the book, they have a Maneck,” he notes, so it can be paralyzing: “I can’t help but wish I could come as close to the Maneck that everybody has in their head.” At the same time, it’s liberating because “Nobody really knows what Maneck is. Nobody knows what he looks like.” What Sharma brings to the stage, then, is himself, given over completely to the part.
Sharma is one of six South Asian actors anchoring Crow’s season opener. Rehearsing alongside Rajaram, Sadiq, Varughese, and Yoganathan has been “a master class on becoming a better performer and becoming better at storytelling.” Asked what that visibility has opened up, and what’s still missing, he doesn’t reach for a polished answer. He admits it’s a question he hasn’t fully worked through yet. What he does know is that this role in A Fine Balance has given him the chance, after years of episodic guest spots, to inhabit “a consistent throughline of beginning, middle, and end as a performer.”
And then, lightning-fast, he shifts from career reflection to boyhood fandom, pointing to his wall, which holds a poster of Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Scarface. It is, he smiles, a role that he has dreamed of playing since childhood.
It’s a fitting close to a half-hour spent with an actor who takes Mistry’s material seriously, and has found his deep personal connection to it … but won’t ever lose his balance of hope, his humility, or himself.
A Fine Balance continues its run in the Guloien Theatre at Crow’s Theatre. Tickets are available at crowstheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
