Piyush Mishra is many things at once: a lyricist, poet, singer, musician, and actor, but in his memoir, he seems to be inquiring into the point of it all, with the aptly titled Tumhari Auqaat Kya Hai, Piyush Mishra—what is your worth, Piyush Mishra?
Translated from Hindi by Shillpi A Singh, the narrative carries Mishra’s instinct to resist form: it is an autobiographical account told through his alter egos, Santap Trivedi and Hamlet, because he does not “have the courage to write an autobiography.” What emerges is a “fierce clash between imagination and reality,” an unapologetic exploration of survival, passion, fear, and addiction, told with honesty that brushes off the myth behind the man. The choice of alter egos works for Mishra—it creates distance, allowing him to confront himself while also evading a full reckoning.
The memoir reads like a bildungsroman, where each city—Gwalior, Delhi, and Mumbai—functions as a stage in Mishra’s evolution. In Gwalior, where he was born, we encounter a strange, inward child who grows into a rebellious teenager, entangled in an illicit love affair with his convent school teacher, Miss Ginger. Even at this nascent stage, there are clear signs of his artistic temperament: an unnamed fear, a deep loneliness, and an engulfing sense of “magic, sorcery, or a miracle”—something Mishra describes as a recurring spiritual experience. He gains local fame for his singing, meeting Pandit Ravi Shankar, who says, “A voice like this at your age? You’ll go far.” We also meet his middle-class family: his father, Prabhash, whom Mishra addresses as “sir”; his grandmother Jidda, who had “done a crash course in growling”; and his mother and friends. Reflecting on this relationship, he writes, “Hamlet had committed an unconditional obedience to memory.”
It is not so much passion as drift that takes him to the National School of Drama. His close friend, Ramakant Vishnoi, often said, “There’s discipline in every bit of indiscipline. You just need the right perspective to see it that way,” a line that becomes central to Hamlet’s way of seeing. And so Hamlet leaves for Delhi, leaving behind his love interest, Sangini, whose memory continues to haunt him. Delhi opens up the world: Shakespeare, Goethe, the Natya Shastra, Brecht, Al Pacino. Here, Mishra realises that “he had done nothing wrong in pursuing a Robert De Niro dream.” Recognition follows. He writes songs that would be heard and loved years later—Ujla hi ujla sheher hoga, Husna, Jab sheher hamara sota hai. His play Hamlet, directed by the “merciless” Fritz Bennewitz, creates a buzz strong enough to draw Ketan Mehta, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, and Basu Bhattacharya to Delhi. For a while, he becomes the ‘king’ of the theatre circuit. But the ascent is restless rather than triumphant, and the narrative repeatedly circles back to the same unease: achievement does not resolve the question of worth.
That unease sharpens in Mumbai, a city that initially refuses him, pushing him deeper into alcoholism. Support from peers like Irrfan Khan offers little stability. It is only later, through love and a sense of grounding, that he returns to find space, recognition, and money—though not necessarily resolution.
Across the narrative, fear emerges as a constant force, shaping decisions and distorting memory. At times, it is ordinary; at others, it takes on an almost metaphysical weight. “Fear enters our lives like an unwelcome guest and it overstays like one too,” he writes. The line captures the book’s central tension: a life driven as much by dread as by desire. There are startling disclosures too: he recalls turning down Maine Pyar Kiya, sleeping on the road beside a corpse, and the trauma of being sexually abused by a relative in childhood. Dotted with personal photographs, the memoir is not just the story of an artist, but the sense of a man circling himself—using music, and theatre to get closer to the truth, even if he never quite arrives.