“We hope that people ask their mother’s their favourite colours.”
This subtle wish for audience members of new play The Roof Is Leaking ਛੱਤ ਚਦੀ ਹੈ speaks volumes about the intent of authors Sanskruti Marathe and Davinder Malhi. The play is a funny, complicated, deeply personal examination of what it means to really see the women who raised us – not merely as mothers, but as individuals. And the duo hope it can spur this kind of simple, yet meaningful real-world inquiry.
Directed by Ash Knight and produced by Pleiades Theatre, The Roof Is Leaking ਛੱਤ ਚਦੀ ਹੈ makes its world premiere at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre from May 2 to 18, 2025. Set in the home of a middle-class Canadian-Punjabi family in Brampton, Ontario, the story opens in the wake of the father’s unexpected death – a moment of rupture that brings long-simmering tensions to the surface. As the family members gather under one roof, the mother of the household, Mummy makes a bold declaration: she wants to divorce her dead husband. This startling pronouncement becomes the catalyst for a raw and alternately hilarious and moving exploration of duty, love, tradition, and personal liberation. As the play unfolds, each character must grapple with their own ghosts and grievances, in order to decide what to uphold – and what to break – in order to find freedom for themselves and each other.
Co-writing a love letter
Described by its creators as “a love letter to South Asian mothers,” The Roof Is Leaking ਛੱਤ ਚਦੀ ਹੈ stars Sarabjeet Arora, Harry Gill, Kiran Kaur, Sarena Parmar, Tia Sandhu, Harpreet Sehmbi, Harit Sohal, and Dharini Woollcombe. And the production brings together a talented team of Punjabi-Canadian artists, in order to ensure cultural specificity and lived authenticity in this intimate, yet expansive – and fully, truly Canadian — story. For Marathe and Malhi, this story began at home. “Without claiming to speak for an entire culture, we believe that mothers are often the central force in many South Asian households — whether that role is openly acknowledged or not,” they explain. “This project was deeply inspired by our own mothers and the lives they’ve led. It was born out of a desire to honour them and everything they’ve done for us.”
But as much as the story is about reverence, it is also a reckoning with the unspoken. “Their tenacity, courage, anger—and perhaps most poignantly, the ways we as their children have sometimes failed to truly see them—were all powerful sources of inspiration,” they continue. But “Punjabi mothers, in particular, are characters we’ve rarely seen explored on stage, and we wanted to give voice to their stories.” As a result, a sense of layered and often unspoken emotional complexity suffuses the play’s writing style.
This complexity stems in part from the co-authors’ different cultural vantage points. While Marathe and Malhi are both Indian, they have divergent relationships with tradition — and they found that this contrast deepened the authenticity of their collaboration. “When it came to finding the humour and grief in the play, it really stemmed from what each of us was inherently good at bringing to the table. Over time, we found harmony in our voices as playwrights,” they reflect. More specifically, “Sanskruti has a knack for mining for moments of comedy, and Davinder deeply values writing the repression within – and the tension between – characters. In many ways, we filled the gaps for each other.”
However, that process was not without friction: “It was tough, especially being first-time playwrights. There were tears and arguments, but there were many more laughs and curiosities that emerged from this project.” And the duo’s shared commitment to depth over stereotype steered them unerringly through difficult patches in the writing: “Instead of falling back on broad South Asian tropes, we chose to zoom in—to look closely at this one family, in this one household, and tell their story with care and nuance. We believed that the more specific we got, the more universally it might resonate—and that’s something we held onto throughout the process.”
Responses to early readings of The Roof Is Leaking ਛੱਤ ਚਦੀ ਹੈ were deeply validating and wonderfully surprising. “Yes, the aunties loved the play,” they recall. “But what really struck us was how young men and uncles came forward, sharing how the play reflected their own internal conflicts and quiet struggles. That meant a lot to us, because we were intentional about not showing men in a one-dimensional way. We wanted to explore how patriarchy doesn’t just restrict women, but also shapes and stifles men – especially when they’re tasked with upholding traditions that no longer serve them.”
Divorcing a dead husband
This theme is encapsulated in one of the play’s most startling and subversive concepts: the idea of a woman choosing to “divorce her dead husband”. “Divorce can already be a taboo topic in Punjabi culture, particularly when it involves women asserting their independence,” note the playwrights. “But the idea of ‘divorcing a dead husband’ pushes that even further. It’s not just about leaving a relationship – it’s about reclaiming identity and autonomy after a lifetime of emotional, cultural, and societal expectations.”
They were drawn to this concept by the challenge of pondering what “freedom actually looks like for someone in our family – especially for our mothers, who often carry the weight of tradition and silence. What does it take for a woman, even after her husband’s death, to say, ‘This part of my life no longer defines me’?” It’s an emotional and cultural separation that asks big questions: How much loss, how much unraveling must a family endure before they truly begin to see one another? What seismic shifts would it take in our worldview to really recognize our mothers as full, complex individuals—not just in relation to us, but in their own right? “From a Punjabi perspective, these questions cut deep. We wanted to explore not just the pain of separation, but the radical possibility of liberation that can emerge from it.”
The family at the centre of the play is navigating precisely this type of major rupture when we meet them just after the passing of their father. “Over the years, they’ve built up layers of emotional callousness – not out of a lack of love, but as a means of survival,” explain the authors. “Each sibling copes differently: the eldest shoulders responsibility, the middle longs to be truly seen, and the son remains at a distance, haunted by expectations he may never meet. “They are fractured, but still bound by a shared history and a house that is literally and metaphorically falling apart.”
One roof – many reckonings
At the heart of it all is the leaking roof. “The leaking roof is a central image in the play. It’s not just a structural issue—it’s a metaphor for everything that’s been left unattended in their relationships: the grief, the resentment, the unspoken truths,” they say. “It represents the slow, inevitable deterioration of a family that’s been avoiding itself for too long.” This moment of crisis ultimately forces the family to confront what they have become – and what they have ignored. Both the symptom and the symbol of their unraveling, the leaking roof can perhaps become the start of something more honest: “It’s a reckoning. They are no longer who they think they are, and this play forces them to truly see one another, maybe for the first time.”
The character of Mummy (played by Dharini Woollcombe) is the emotional epicentre of that reckoning. “Through personal experiences and what we hear and see in our community, we realized that once your identity as a mother and wife is stamped onto you, it doesn’t really matter if your husband is dead or alive. You are still chained to that label,” the playwrights explain. So they wanted to write the character of a woman who, against all odds, would “choose freedom, regardless of her circumstances – in this case, a dead husband and the colossal damage it would cause to the family’s upheld structure. We wanted her to choose her freedom even if she didn’t know how to. Even if it would never make sense, according to the rules of the world. Even if it was just for her. And in that pursuit, set everyone free.”
And the writing process represented a reckoning for the authors, who both drew deeply from personal experience. “I grew up in a fiercely loving, loud, messy, loyal, and beautifully harsh family—and that energy pulses through this play,” says Malhi. “Some of the characters and their dynamics are rooted in my own lived experience. Some lines are lifted directly from real life…. The way the characters speak—their phrasing, how they swear, how they dodge vulnerability or reach for connection—feels, at times, deeply specific to my upbringing.”
Writing these characters caused Malhi herself to see how “growing up, I was mean. Especially to my family”. “It wasn’t until I moved away for university that I began to unpack that meanness. It was a tool—a form of self-preservation, and in some twisted way, a way of trying to keep my family intact.” That emotional distance—and the clarity it brought—informs the journey of the play’s characters, who must learn to see each other anew, after years of emotional shorthand and silence.
For her part, Marathe experienced an equally personal reckoning. “I was raised by a single mom, who chose to divorce her husband, and, in doing so, became somewhat of an outlaw. I witnessed her ostracization firsthand. I was her companion, as she built her life back up from nothing… My mother had to choose freedom for herself. And our character has to choose her freedom, too, because no matter the destruction it causes, there is truly nothing more powerful than living this life on your own terms.” Marathe adds that she is deeply cognizant of how “emotional callouses build in families—how we walk past them for years, pretending they don’t exist – until they start surfacing during dinners, in vague conversations, or at random wedding functions.”
The cost of healing
For both writers, it was crucial to reflect the complexity – and yes, the price – of naming what has long gone unspoken. “It’s a powerful thing to break those generational silences, but it also comes at a personal cost,” says Marathe. “We hope that first- and second-generation audiences find a piece of their home and their struggle in this story, and in doing so, find the courage to talk about these wounds… and begin to heal them.”
In a play where truths leak like rain through a porous ceiling, The Roof Is Leaking ਛੱਤ ਚਦੀ ਹੈ shows us a family in crisis, while daring us to hold our own a little closer, reconsider what we’ve overlooked in them, and ask the questions we’ve never thought to ask before. Because sometimes, new insight and deeper understanding can spring from a question as simple as “What’s your favourite colour?”
The Roof Is Leaking ਛੱਤ ਚਦੀ ਹੈ (105 minutes with no intermission) is on stage at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre from May 2 to 25, 2025. Reserve tickets at CanadianStage.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
