Ahir Shah’s award-winning show Ends packs a punch with its take on immigration and identity through an intergenerational tale. A conversation with the comic who made his India debut at the NCPA this year.

By Aishwarya Bodke

When we arrive at the final moments of Ahir Shah’s Ends in a breathtakingly quiet room, misty eyes in the seats next to mine shed a tear or two as Shah fights back his. A rare sight at a comedy show. But Shah’s work has that quality. Beneath its unmistakable charm and infectious optimism, runs an underlying sense of grief.

Earnest soliloquies delivered at a near breathless pace make way to tell an intergenerational tale and before you know it, you are all ears. Shah paints a picture of post-independence India when, in 1964, his grandfather had to move to England to start a new life. The sacrifices he made to make it in a foreign country, and eventually be able to summon his family there, permeates through Shah’s second-generation British-Indian veins. Shah frequently asks himself: What if Nanaji could see the distance the country he chose to make a home in has travelled? “Sacrifice is not more impressive than achievement. Sacrifice is the achievement,” he insists.

Identity, family and immigration pass through the lens of British politics through the decades. From Enoch Powell’s rhetoric against the non-white population in Britain which led to his Rivers of Blood speech in 1968 to Rishi Sunak’s emergence as Prime Minister of the UK in 2024—the complete spectrum finds a mention. “Politically, I’m furious,” Shah says about Sunak, “racially, thrilled.”

Ends had a spectacular run at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe. A work-in-progress then, owing to the death of its first director Adam Brace, it went on to win the Best Comedy Show at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, arguably the most important honour in the field. Shah brought the show to India for the first time this year. After a successful debut in January, he returned to the NCPA in April to a packed house. Excerpts from a conversation:

ON Stage: You won the most prestigious comedy award at a festival as old as independent India. The stand-up scene in India, however, is nascent yet burgeoning at an incredible pace. What do you make of this growth in such a short time?
Ahir Shah: The comedy scene here is relatively new but with streaming coming in, everything can be accessed at the click of a button. It is the kind of growth that bypasses different stages, and I think that is how the evolution of stand-up struck India.

This was the first time I brought a show here. The fact of life is that nationality is an accident of birth. But in my case, as for many others, it was simultaneously an active decision made by my family 60 years ago. So, performing this show here will always have a special significance, girded with the realisation of it being the story of my family, most particularly, how we ended up in the UK. My grandfather left [India] rather reluctantly and there was nothing inevitable to any of this. Just as there is nothing inevitable about me then becoming a stand-up comedian and travelling in order to tell this story. And yet, there is something about it that feels like life has come full circle

OS: What were the origins of Ends before you toured with it to other countries and it became a Netflix special?
AS: I started by interviewing my mum. I prepared a few questions in advance and she shared them with other people to get as much information as possible. I did not want the questions to be a surprise. I wanted solid facts. There was so much I did not know. So, a lot of the stuff that ended up in the show was born out of these interviews. Sometimes the conversation would lead to certain lines and one such significant line in the show ended up being the title.

OS: Please take us through your writing process.
AS: There are many great things about stand-up but something I value is that as a comedian, I can have an idea right now and find out tonight whether it is any good. It is remarkably immediate. It would take years between the initial idea and finding out whether it truly lands or not for a novelist or a filmmaker. A lot of the writing and editing as a stand-up ends up happening onstage and you don’t want to be just saying the same words and doing a monologue to the effect that your heart would stop being in it after a while. It is about finding a new angle or a slightly different way of saying things to keep yourself interested in it.

OS: Is anything off-limits while you are writing? Is all comedy inherently political?
AS: Not particularly, but it is about what I am interested in talking about at the moment. For example, there is nothing about Donald Trump in the show. That is not because I do not have opinions on Donald Trump. It is because he is irrelevant to the story of my family.  

About comedy being political, I think there is a way of working yourself towards a yes to that question. My family history, which is so personal, is also intimately tied to that of the country. It goes back to a decision that my grandmother made for my grandfather. They were taking people to England then and he had to go. As honest as that sentence is, it is also very politically loaded in what it meant in practice in 1964. It was two years after the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed in the UK, which was the first thing that restricted immigration from post-imperial commonwealth countries, which in itself was a reaction to things that had been happening in the late ’50s. This is all inherently political. It just happened to be happening to someone who was, as far as he was concerned, a pretty normal guy trying to do right by his wife and kids.

OS: Grief is a constant undercurrent as you tell the story of your grandfather but it also manifests in the passing of the brilliant director of your show.
AS: In earlier versions of the show, there was a bit that was explicitly about Adam. We were going to work on this show together and then he suddenly fell ill, and shortly thereafter, passed away. It still feels ridiculous that something like that should have happened. It ended up affecting the pathway that the show took in becoming what it did. He could not direct this show but there is also a sense in which he did. Everything that was accumulated from years of working together was still in me. It does not go away because the person is not around any more. Since his passing, Adam’s partner and family have all come to see the show and said they can see his fingerprints on it.

OS: How has your comedy evolved since you started performing at the age of 15?
AS: I am 34 now. It was well over half a lifetime ago and everything has changed. But I was always interested in comedy as a kid. It was largely because of the series Goodness Gracious Me, which started airing in the UK in the late ’90s. During my mid-teens, my father had been proactive in making me try as many different things as possible. If you like science at school, it might tell you that you want to be a scientist, but how does one find out that they want to be a stand-up comedian? By doing stand-up comedy. They are not going to get you to do that in school.

The first couple of gigs I did—as an occasional hobby after school—were before the smoking ban came into effect in indoor spaces in the UK. So I would be in rooms above pubs as a 15-year-old, nervously holding a microphone and telling my silly little jokes in a room thick with cigarette smoke. That is something that really places the shift in my head because it does not exist any more.

OS: You anchor an unusual amount of optimism in Ends.
Where do you get this hope from? AS: I don’t want to be predominantly driven by despair because it is incredibly easy and can often lead to inaction. I read this somewhere and it resonated strongly: The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

I think that is a nice way of going about it. People often talk of this golden age that passed long before they were born and everything has precipitously got worse since then. It is a different world now if we look at the larger picture of what has happened to child mortality globally since 1990; to autocracy and democracy; to the explosion of increased wealth in the developing world; to preponderance. A lot is terrible but pretty much everything is better than it was. The idea of doing better is far more appealing to me.

This article was originally published in the June 2025 issue of ON Stage.