Srutika Sabu didn't set out to be a performer. Originally, she set out to be a doctor.

The Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist describes herself as a "generation 1.5" immigrant. Born in South India, her family immigrated to Canada when she was a child, landing in Brampton, Ont., before relocating again to the United States when she was in high school.

"My parents decided the 2008 financial crisis was the right time to move to New Jersey to work in banking," she says. "I graduated high school there, I went to undergrad there, I went to med school there. I kind of followed this, like, very typical, very model minority, very South Asian excellence sort of path."

In November 2019, shortly after finishing medical school, she felt like she needed a year off to "find herself" before starting her residency. So she moved back to Toronto temporarily to decompress. Then COVID hit — which she says, caused her to have "an existential crisis, like, I need to do something else in my life."

By the time COVID restrictions had lifted, Sabu found herself stuck in Toronto, away from her family, with an expired U.S. visa and in need of some friends. So she took an improv course. From there, things quickly snowballed. In 2023, she took a clown class. Then she took a drag king class with performer Deanna Fleysher. She started working with Sweet Action Theatre Company, which she describes as "basically a clown cult," but also a place where "people from all backgrounds and all points in their artistic journey come and, like, incubate shows and ideas." And by the summer of 2024, she had a show in the Toronto Fringe Festival.

She says that while she found performing therapeutic in a lot of ways, clown wasn't an immediate fit for her.

"It was going against a lot of my programming," she says. "If you grew up in a certain, specific type of Asian household, you have to do things the right way. You can't fail. You have to keep up appearances. And what's so liberating about clown, in particular for me, was that literally the whole point of it is to fail, acknowledge the failure, and that's how you bring joy to the audience. And I was really bad at it for that reason."

Her first show, 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go: Tosh Finds His Groove, starred her drag king/clown alter ego, Santosh Santosh — a self-proclaimed "tech bro, thought leader and second-hand Tesla owner." Sabu describes the character as a "beautiful love letter to South Asian masculinity."

"He's a drunk uncle at a wedding, and also at the same time, he's incredibly optimistic, [always with] a bunch of business ideas," she says.

Despite her medical education, Sabu says she was always an artist at heart. As a kid, she loved drawing and writing and music. Her parents encouraged her pursuits — but only up to a point. Once she started trying to make it a career, they were less enthused.

"The reason my sister and I are the artsy kids we are is because my mom gave us so much free time, indulged us [in] any sort of artistic pursuit that we wanted, encouraged us, had so much feedback for us, and paid for piano lessons and all this sort of stuff," she says. "But I think it got too real for her, where, you know, she's like, 'Oh, I think I gave my children too much freedom, because now they're making a decision that I cannot imagine making.'"

In addition to getting ready to do a remount of 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go in Vancouver, Sabu is also about to debut a new show Neptune's with a Fish, a musical comedy which she describes as "a semi-autobiographical journey told through magical realism and a talking egg."

"[It's about] trying to interrogate who's allowed to be an artist and what does being an artist mean, philosophically and spiritually. Also, like, how is that connected to our migration history?"

Sabu says that the children of immigrants are often discouraged from pursuing artistic careers, in part because their parents were "traumatized by the points-based immigration system." Her parents were allowed to immigrate to Canada, and subsequently to the United States, because they had chosen particular career paths and "studied the right thing at the right time." If they had been artists, she adds, they probably wouldn't have been allowed to come.

That said, in some ways, it was her parents' practicality which allowed her to walk away from a career in medicine to pursue one in clown, she points out.

"They sort of attribute their ability to provide their children with a sense of safety and options [to having] made certain choices at the expense of what they might have wanted to do," she says. "But those choices allowed the future generation to have more options than they did."