In the southern Indian
city of Bangalore where this short novel is set, the nonsense
expression ghachar ghochar translates
roughly—in the private parlance of one particular family—as “tangled beyond repair”. The fact
that Bangalore is the setting of this novel about the trials and vicissitudes
of contemporary middle class Indian life is anything but arbitrary. As India’s
second fastest-growing metropolis, Bangalore, once known primarily as the
Garden City of India, is now known internationally as the Silicon Valley of
India, home to IT companies like Infosys and Wipro, as well as to such varied
multinational corporations as Bosch, Boeing, GM, Google, Microsoft, and
Mercedes-Benz. What this has meant for the local population is a new, greater, often violently disorienting social mobility, so that virtually overnight literally thousands
of Indians have moved from lives of grim subsistence to ones of solidly middle
class conventions, fears, and dreams.
Ghachar Ghochar is the story of just such a family, in this case a poor family made suddenly prosperous by the profits of a spice company they founded. Not
surprisingly the members are not entirely at ease in this new role of theirs, wrestling
daily with the many challenges and responsibilities that accompany this radical
change of fortune. Told in a spare, restrained, often finely distilled prose, a
cleanly wry style reminiscent of R.K. Narayan, the novel, this parody really, is
first and foremost that of the unnamed narrator, the son in the family, who
surveys the swiftly unraveling scene around him with a cool, sardonic eye.
Perhaps only at the very end does one of his eyelids twitch! Best read in a
single day. Enjoy.
Ghachar Ghochar was translated from Kannada by
Srinath Perur.
Peter
Adam Nash
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