Pai Pai: The Smallest Coin in India, and What It Costs

The pai was the smallest coin the Indian rupee was ever divided into. Three pai made a pice, twelve pice an anna, sixteen annas a rupee — so a pai was one part in a hundred and ninety-two, a unit so nearly worthless that it survived longest not as money but as a figure of speech. Pai pai: every last fraction of it. You account for it pai pai. You pay it back pai pai. The coin went out of circulation in 1947. The phrase did not.

Dhiruben Patel took the phrase for a title and gave it to a houseful of teenagers. They are certain that their parents are holding out on them — that whatever pocket money they get, it is less than what the situation calls for. Rather than complain, they decide to fix it. They will earn the difference themselves.

What follows is a sequence of schemes, each one ingenious in the way that only a plan made by school friends can be ingenious, and each one a failure. And at the end of the failures the children arrive somewhere they had not been aiming for: an understanding of what their parents actually put in to build the comfortable house they had been walking through without noticing. It is a play about the craze for money in the world these children are growing into, and it is written as farce, which is the only honest way to write it for an audience that contains both the children and the parents.

Dhiruben Patel was, by 2015, among the most decorated writers in the language. Born in Vadodara in 1926 to the journalist Gordhanbhai Patel and the political activist Gangaben Patel, she took her B.A. in English at Bhavan's College in 1945 and her M.A. there in 1949, then taught at the same institution. She founded the Kalki Prakashan publishing house in 1963, edited the journal Sudha from 1966 to 1975, and was president of the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad in 2003–04. Her novel Agantuk won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001 and was published in English as Rainbow at Noon. Andhali Gali is taught. Bhavni Bhavai became a film. She translated Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn into Gujarati. The Ranjitram Suvarna Chandrak came in 1980.

That last detail is the one that matters here. A writer who spent part of her life bringing Mark Twain's boys into Gujarati was never going to condescend to children on a stage, and Pai Pai does not. The ethical argument in it is exact, but it is not delivered by an adult to a child. It is arrived at by the children, late, after they have run out of schemes.

Ideas Unlimited had been staging her for years by then. Agantuk went up in 2003. Mummy Tu Aavi Kevi was made for the summer children's festival at Prithvi Theatre in 2010. Pai Pai continues that line, and it is the one where the company's habit of casting young and playing fast pays off most directly.

Manoj Shah directed and also went into the cast, which is worth noting, because the structure of the play needs one adult inside the children's world rather than outside commenting on it. In the production photographs he is the man in the bucket hat and the printed waistcoat, sitting on a coloured box in the middle of five teenagers, being talked at. The company around him — Riddhi Vora, Durgesh Rajput, Maulik Shah, Prakash Waghela, Prashant Savalia, Nimesh Shinde and Rushikesh Chandaran — plays the whole thing at the pitch of a house where everyone is shouting and nobody is angry.

The set is a teenager's living room, printed to the back wall: exposed brick, a long low couch, a television, and a column of pop-star posters down one side, Justin Bieber at eye height. Three coloured boxes — purple, blue, green — do all the furniture work. It is a design that tells you the year without a word of dialogue, and it puts the audience's own children's bedrooms on stage, which is the point.

Pai Pai was presented in the fifth NCPA Summer Fiesta, the festival that ran from 1 May to 15 June 2015, with its performance in the Godrej Dance Theatre on Sunday 10 May at four in the afternoon. The Godrej seats a hundred and seventy-seven. The play runs two hours with an interval. It also went into the children's festival at Prithvi Theatre.

The poster carries the whole play in one image. A coin hangs on a fishing line — a real one, a 1945 one-pice piece with a hole punched through the centre — cast from a moon that is shaped like a pie, by a small silhouetted figure in a hat sitting in the curve of it. Below, clouds. The line goes down and the coin dangles just out of reach. The Gujarati poster adds the only other thing you need to know: ૬ થી ૧૦૬ વર્ષના બાળકો માટે — for children aged six to a hundred and six.

Dhiruben Patel died in Ahmedabad in March 2023, at ninety-six. She had spent seventy years writing in a language she never once suggested was too small for anything, including a joke about money told to an audience of ten-year-olds and their parents at the same time.