Ghachar Ghochar

GHACHAR GHOCHAR (Review written on 21.6.2017)

GHACHAR GHOCHAR sounds like it comes from Bengali (Bangla), a nonsense word that Sukumar Ray may have invented. The title of Vivek Shanbhag’s highly acclaimed novella makes sense once you understand it means a hopeless entanglement, the ghichad-michad in which you find wires or naadas (or your chuddies in a twist), and when you pronounce it quickly, not with a ponderous elongation or emphasis. This is not (as NYT gauchely titled a review) The Great Indian Novel but a slim novella about "money control”, the disfigurement of the lives of a family that transits from having very little to having more than its members can handle.

The effortlessness of Srinath Perur’s translation is remarkable — unselfconscious and unobtrusive with no dramatic effects, but with just the right level of local flavour (“iron box”) to make you hear the contemporary Kannada of Shanbhag’s original below the English at the surface*. There is no stilted dialogue, even when the conversations are apparently formulaic. Apparently formulaic, since so much of what is said by the characters often connotes something else.

This is a story with no dramatic twists and turns, and no magical realism. There is drama, the kind that lies menacingly below the quotidian. This is a tragedy but not of the spectacular kind. No deaths, but loss. Rather, the unravelling of melancholy family life which has transited from the ``lower-middle class poverty’’ (that many of us have seen in our lives) to an arriviste prosperity (towards which we seem to be working) takes on a greater sadness because of its very banality. The descriptions of the old little house and the furniture, particularly the observations about the ants, are superb. They glow, not conspicuously like deliberately set jewels, but with the warm richness of fine observation.

The narrative is not without its flaws. The narrator and his observations seem far too sensitive for someone who is given to fleeing the domestic conflicts and retreating to Coffee House. The narrative is too narrowly focussed on his family, with little about neighbours and friends, schoolmates and teachers — figures who normally loom large in our lives and memories. The waiter Vincent hovers too prominently in the beginning, only to disappear though the main course of the narrative — although he briefly reappears at the end. The conclusion leaves us with a sense that something has been lost forever, but without any empathy for the narrator, without us sharing his sense of bewilderment and hopelessness.

But in a summer where we will be ministered over-the-top yappiness of the utmost variety, this understated masterpiece is the book I will be pressing into the hands of friends.

(*) I don’t read Kannada, though I understand the language well enough to appreciate some of the literary nuances; I suppose I got a smidgeon of this from my father, who was considered a Kannada man of letters, having translated several works from his mother tongue to English, most notably some novels and the autobiography of the polymath Shivaram Karanth.