Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Published on: 02/27/17 7:40 AM

Book review: Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbagh; translation by Srinath Perur

This is more a brief take than review.

The ties that bind…hard

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag. Translated by Srinath Perur. Harper Perennial Books.

This little gem of a story deals in domestic doings, and the teller of the tale is an unnamed male at the centre of everything that is happening to his family.

Like stones dropped into a shallow well, Providence keeps rippling the surface of his domestic life. First the family sees a sudden influx in wealth, necessitating both a change of residence and lifestyle. Next, the narrator brings home a wife; she is his bride through an arranged match and the stones she casts into the well are small but significant.

And finally, the ripples in the family well looks set to  scatter the peace, rend the functioning pattern so vital to this, to any, family. The family dynamics are complicated, as most family dynamics invariably are, walking, as the author says, like a single body across the tightrope of their circumstances.

We watch as the sole earning member, Appa, is laid off suddenly, then takes a resigned second place to his younger brother, Chikkappa,  the person who opens the portals of prosperity for the family. We watch Anita the young bride learning more than the ropes of the family she has married into, and slowly growing disenchanted  by what she sees.

We watch the narrator`s sister Malati leave her marriage, come home and grow a waspish tongue. The beauty of the story lies in the fact that while the reader totally gets the setting and why the characters feel the way they do, act the way they act, sympathy is still one remove away.

Dealings as it does with homespun homilies, (wealth shouldn’t strike suddenly like a visitation but grow gradually like a tree; money controls us, when there` s only a little,  it behaves meekly, when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us; when you have no choice, you have no discontent; a man in our society is supposed to fulfil his wife`s financial needs but who knew he was expected to earn money through his own toil?),  the story is told shorn of any frills, with slow loops into the past.

The reader enters the life of the narrator literally through a side door, that of his favourite haunt,  the Coffee House,  with its rather prescient waiter Vincent. One gets the idea of rich lived in frugal surrounds. Then, their surrounds turn comfortably plush and the quality of their lives seem interlaced with some amount of disaffection and stress. The weather in their heads gets more squally by the day.

Perur`s translation is a fluid one, letting us believe we are reading the tale in its original Kannada. There is a passage when a new gas connection is set up at the new house; the excitement is palpable, the undertones both nostalgic and wry.

Another time, the narrator wakes up in the middle of the night to see his mother squatting on her haunches shining a flashlight on a line of ants. These ants are suddenly appearing everywhere in the house and there is a concerted effort by the family to rid themselves of …what? A nuisance? Something more ominous?

And that’s when it dawned on me that the passage breaks in the book were illustrations of a single ant! For all the gentle humour, the air of impending disaster seems to lurk just off the page throughout.

I`ll fall back on that old trope: a must-read.

 

 

family dynamicsGhachar GhocharKannada storySrinath PerurVivek Shanbhag

Sheila Kumar • February 27, 2017


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