Ghachar Ghochar : Vivek Shanbhag / Srinath Perur

 Brave new world

Societies rise and decline over time not unlike people. This involves birth pangs, separations, coming off age, and decline in fortunes among other things. Every so often there is a particular moment in time when a society transforms from one phase to another which is enthralling as well as painful for those people in the middle of it all. Of course this is fertile ground for literature and there are many instances where writers catch this transformation in all its complexity. Occasions include Dickens following the emergence of an England into the industrial age, Tolstoy tracing Russia’s break from feudalism and so on.

India too has gone through such a transformation in the last 25 years brought about by the economic liberalization started in the early 90s. The liberalization unleashed elemental forces that swept the entire population making some raise with the tide and some drown in its ferocity leading to the emergence of a new India. Most notably Aravind Adiga has captured this transformation in English at the macro level but here in this great Kannada novel we have Vivek Shanbhag capture this transformation at the basic unit of Indian society – the Family. ‘Ghachar Ghochar’ captures the opportunities unleashed by the economic liberalization and the joys, anxieties and fears it invokes in the middle classes who are the most impacted by it.  

The story revolves around a small lower-middle class family living in one of the many small rented houses in Bangalore where you could open the door and be on the road in ‘exactly four steps’. It’s a family of five where the father is a diligent salesman with meagre earnings and the mother who manages the household with their son – the narrator – and their temperamental daughter. The fifth member is the father’s younger brother ‘chikkappa’, a commerce graduate with initiative and vigour. The family subsists on the salary of the father who goes out every morning to sell tea powder and tallies the money accrued and sends it to the head office the next morning. They have a hand-to-mouth existence and limited desires but are a satisfied lot since ‘when you have no choice, you have no discontent either’.

The author manages to capture the lower-middle class life of the pre-liberalization era and it deeply resonates with those who lived that life. The small unventilated houses which were barely furnished save for a table and chair, the way the entire family helped the bread winners in their job, the euphoric celebration on the arrival of a ‘gas connection’ (something which is taken for granted now), the numerous tea sessions conducted to pass time, the washing of ‘vessels’ – all these bring to life the India of those times beautifully.

There is an affecting scene early in the book where the father makes an error in his tallying which results in 800 rupees left unaccounted and the entire household toils to find out the error to save the father from having to pay the amount from his pocket. The mystery is solved early the next morning by the chikkappa after a sleepless night of poring over tally sheets and the family celebrates the triumph the next morning as if it’s a festival. The scene touches you because it brings to memory those times when such acts of collective responsibility and collective joy were possible and are no longer possible now. It recreates an era that is gone right in front of our eyes.

Then comes liberalization which gives the educated middle class people who have the enterprise a great chance of social mobilization. And chikkappa is the right man at the right time and he invests his brother’s retirement money (in exchange for a 50% stake) and sundry loans to start a trading company which flourishes beyond imagination making the entire family rich. The rest of the novel is a brilliant study of the effects of the sudden wealth on the family members and how it changes their equation with each other and with society at large. It explores what happens when the lower middle-class crosses that coveted line and becomes the upper-middle class within a short span of time. It explores the impact of new money on age old middle class values such as decency, honesty and thrift. And finally the impact it has had on Indian families. The study is fascinating and all this is done in a little over hundred pages which is a miracle of conciseness.

Probably such a story can only be narrated in an Indian language as it is more suitable to explore the family life of a typical middle class family. Having said that the translation by Srinath Perur brilliantly conveys the ideas and thoughts of the original and keeps the Indian-ness of the original text. The Kannada idioms are translated faithfully hence you have new English sayings like ‘Holes in dosas in everyone’s house’ or ‘the newly rich carry umbrellas to keep moonlight at bay’ or 'this girl is good as gold'. The translation also weighs in on its own by contributing phrases like ‘chemical warfare’ to describe the mother’s use of potions and powders to fight an ant menace in the old house. But the biggest success of the translation is something else. Every piece of art conveys something unsaid and it is the recreation of this unsaid in a language like English which is as different from a language like Kannada is the biggest success of the translator.

The ‘Ghachar Ghochar’ of the title is a nonsense word invented by the narrator’s wife to describe a situation that is entangled beyond recovery. At the end of the book most of the characters find their lives to be in such an entangled state owing to the choices they made in response to the challenges posed by liberalization. It is a beautiful metaphor for modern India and a cautionary tale for the generation ahead as they face the brave new world created by liberalization.

Chinaman - The Legend of Pradeep Mathew : Shehan Karunatilaka

An Ode to Sport

Everyone who follows sport has encountered this inevitable question from family and friends at least once: What is the point of sport? The question acquires an edge especially when one does not play the sport or in any other way benefit from watching it. This amazing novel is a long, rambling attempt to answer this question and as a result it is an ode to sport. It is also the great Sri Lankan novel we have been waiting for as it intimates us with the culture and recent history of the country and the exaggerated role Cricket plays in its life.

WG Karunasena is an alcoholic Cricket journalist who in his heydays has written for the best journals in the country and abroad although he is largely ignored now. He is a lover of sports who sees beauty in “free kicks, late cuts, slam dunks, tries from halfway, and balls that turn from off to leg”. He is a drunk too and claims that alcohol has rid him of cliches and made him into a better writer and unabashedly admires the "drug refined over the centuries by all civilizations".

But he is dying. Thanks to his prolonged drinking habit. However to make the most of the remainder of his ever shortening life he has embarked on a quest to discover Pradeep S. Matthew, an elusive chinaman bowler who has been erased from the cricketing history who he considers as the greatest cricketer ever. On this quest WG discovers startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself. In the process he tries to answer the above mentioned question about the significance of sport. Time is short and we as readers are not sure whether he will manage to make it that long but he is confident as he philosophically puts it "there is nothing as inspiring as a solid deadline".

Sri Lanka is in the middle of a civil war, a consequence of the high-handedness of the Sinhala majority who "knew the Tamils could out-bat, out-think, out-everything" them. Amidst this war cricket is the only outlet for normalcy and the country is indeed blessed with a talented bunch of cricketers one of whom is Pradeep Matthew. A Tamil, he practices the rare art of left-arm chinaman and owner of numerous mystery deliveries including the unearthly double-bounce ball. However he does have a reputation for brushing the people in authority including fellow players the wrong way and after a promising start to his career has mysteriously disappeared. But WG knows he is a genius as he has watched him live in a match where he bamboozled the visiting team by taking 9 wickets including his famed delivery. The match is abandoned for some political reason and it is forgotten in everyone’s mind except WG’s who is now inspired to discover him and write about him.

WG is aided by his friend Ari and together they embark on this quest overcoming major squabbles (‘Murali chucks or not?’) and talking to various people connected to Pradeep including his family, fellow players and coaches. In the middle of this quest comes the 1996 world cup and to everyone’s surprise Sri Lanka "whack the cup" and cricket becomes even more popular in the country. Monetary rewards chase the players, even lesser known ones become millionaires, except Pradeep that is,  who stays out of it all and thereafter undergoes a slide in form and finally disappears. The rest of the book is about if and how WG tracks Pradeep down, how he comes to term with his family and whether he will have a happy ending to his life’s innings.

The book is remarkable about its insight into sport as WG admits that "Of course there is little point to sports" but hastily adds "there is little point to anything. In a thousand years, grass will have grown over all our cities. Nothing of anything will matter." But sport he says produces magical moments that can be remembered for hundreds of years and that is the whole point of sports. As he puts it…

“Sport can unite worlds, tear down walls, and transcend race, the past and all probability. Unlike life, sport matters.”

It’s a beautiful sentiment and one that we sport lovers can use to counter when someone inevitably questions why we follow sport.

The novel also explores the state of the Lankan nation and also on the Sinhala-Tamil tension. He laments the Murphy’s law of nations which Sri Lanka seems to have followed where by the colonized country becomes a parody of the colonizers and instead of inheriting their good traits they inherit their bad ones. As he ruefully says "we inherit the power lust of our conquerors but none of their vision". This I dare say is true of India too. 

He says that although the British as part of their ‘divide and conquer’ policy created a fissure between the communities, "by the 1950s, we begin to develop our own dangerous ideas without any foreign assistance. The idea that the nation belongs to the Sinhala or that Tamil deserve a separate state." The novel cites the example of India which despite more diversity has managed to create a united, peaceful state. Finally the author compares how similar the two communities indeed are and hopes for a reconciliation in the not too distant future.

In the end, this novel can be described as the arrival of Sri Lankan literature in English, indeed it is the ‘Great Sri Lankan Novel’ and all that English literature aficionados like us can do is echo that famous quote ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’.

Last Man in Tower : Aravind Adiga

 The Old man and the Building

At a vertiginous moment in this brilliant Novel the eponymous last man in the tower - Masterji - looks at the neighbors he has lived with for 30 years and asks the question “Am I looking at good people or bad?” It is the sort of question we find ourselves asking about people around us whom we feel we knew who change drastically when circumstances change and to our dismay they become strangers. 'Last man in Tower' is a devastating portrayal of shifting morals of shifty people in the city of Mumbai. A city which is always asking “What do you want?” and goading you to get it and in the process enriching you and itself thereby making it into a megalopolis. Here is when a person like Masterji stands out as an anachronism as he wants “nothing”.

Yogesh Murthy or Masterji is an obdurate teacher and widower belonging to the Vishram society in the northern suburb of Mumbai. Vishram society is “a dreadnought of middle class respectability” built in the 1950s and by the start of the Novel already creaking under infrastructural problems. The society is home to a kaleidoscope of people belonging to various castes and creed who over the years have shared each other’s joys and sorrows and have generally got along like one big family.

Enter Dharmen Shah who sees in the acquisition of this society for redevelopment a chance to become the biggest builder in the city. He has in fact called the new luxury apartment building he is set to build on the site ‘Shanghai’, a tribute to the Chinese who he idolizes for their sheer will power. He is no novice in such matters as he believes that “human greed must be respected” and hence makes a generous offer to the residents of the society. Eventually all but Masterji are goaded to accept the offer by appealing to their basest selfish desires. Only Masterji holds out despite his neighbors’ pleas and eventual boycott as he is the one who has least to gain from the offer as the building is “pregnant with his past”. A past with his loving but deceased wife and daughter. Also he sees in this final battle a chance to redeem his lifelong timidity in dealing with similar situations earlier in his life. A chance to become a man again at the age of 61. So much is his stubbornness that it seems to border on Nihilism making him an ambivalent hero whom we are not sure whether to sympathize with or not.

Masterji hails from the Karnataka coast and has made it as a teacher in Mumbai. He has old world virtues and moralities and a penchant for acquiring knowledge. His son has inherited none of his qualities and has moved out with his family which has left Masterji alone. He has recently retired and spends the time teaching the society kids and despite being agnostic reads spiritual books about transmigration of the soul to understand what became of his wife and daughter. He is the kind of man who does not trod over a Times of India copy because one of his students writes for it now.

Dharmen Shah on the other hand is also a self-made man who came from his Gujarat village to the city with a handful of rupees and made it as one of the most important builders by a combination of “charm and brutality”. He can charmingly breakup a mutiny of laborers as well as threaten people with violence to leave their homes.  He believes that “deep down, everyone admires violence”. He divides the world into two kinds of men “those who can get things done and those that can’t” and he places himself proudly in the former. On the verge of greatness he encounters a man who has the same stubbornness as him but on the other end of the morality spectrum. And he knows he has met his match in Masterji in whom he sees, “a weak man who has found a place where he feels strong”.

As Hegel used to say a tragic situation is one when two rights collide. And here in the collision of the builder and the old teacher we have a classic tragic situation which Adiga brilliantly delineates. Along the way Adiga shines his light on the amoral nature of human beings and the collusion of vested interests in the city and society in general who will eventually get what they want even at great human cost. Hence Adiga is ringing a gong about the kind of society we have become and it is gripping as it is disgusting to see what unfolds.

Once the battle lines are drawn both the teacher and the builder dig their hoofs in. Masterji takes recourse to what he thinks are institutions of democracy – Police, Law and Media – who all disappoint him showing how hollowed out with corruption they have become to be of any use to the weak. Shah himself is trapped in his own image as a builder who will be the first suspect if anything happens to Masterji. Hence he relies on psychological tactics to influence Masterji’s neighbors to do what he himself cannot do. The denouement of the Novel deals with how these two opposite men face off each other and who wins in the end. However ironically they never meet through ought the Novel and their fight is carried out in the shadows of the city and its institutions. They are like two massive celestial beings circling each other trying to gobble each other up without ever meeting.

Although this book does not have the biting satire of the White Tiger it is one of the finest examples of character studies ever attempted in fiction. The characters are put inside the cauldron created by the clashing moral universes of the two protagonists, allowed to simmer in their hypocrisy and in the end stripped of their basic human decency. They look like the people Adiga characterizes in his other Novel 'Selection Day' while describing the Indian middle class 

“What are we, then? We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbor's children in five minutes, and our own in ten”.

This Novel is a moral playground of epic proportions and is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the decadence of our times.