Home / Sunday-mid-day / / Article /
Behram’s ark
Updated On: 22 May, 2022 08:14 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
Adi Pocha turns novelist, a few months shy of 60, to tell the story of an eccentric Parsi man driven by a bizarre ambition—to build a wooden boat to save his people
Listen to this article :
As part of the research for his book, Pocha visited Salaya in Gujarat, where he saw first-hand how boats were built. Pic courtesy/Adi Pocha
For writer-director-ad filmmaker Adi Pocha, inspiration came from home. His theatre actor father Jimmy Pocha—“eccentric is a mild word to describe him,” he says—gave him enough material to never run dry of telling a good story. “He was a comedian on Parsi-Gujarati stage, and had a pretty good sense of humour. As a teen, he’d get on a tram with one of those old [portable] wind-up gramophones and play it to entertain himself. It was quite a ridiculous thing to do [on public transport], but he enjoyed it. Another mad thing he and his friends did in their 20s was to drive down with one of their cars to [Flora] Fountain; they’d park it in the middle of the road, put it up on jacks and take out all the tyres. When a cop would come charging at them [for disrupting traffic], they’d tell him that they were trying to figure out which tyre had a puncture. Why this was entertaining to them, I have no clue. But that’s who he was. He’d tell us so many insane stories, and there was no reason to disbelieve him,” shares Pocha, over a telephonic call.
Jimmy Pocha’s quirks—traits that were not lost on his son—became the inspiration behind Behram Rustomjee, the protagonist of his debut novel Behram’s Boat (Leadstart Inkstate). Behram, he says, is a composite character. “But, he is largely based on my dad and myself.”
Read Next Story
Trending Stories
Latest Photos
Latest Videos
Latest Web Stories
ADVERTISEMENT
Mid-Day Fast
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT