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Indian Express
28-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
‘Holes in dosas in everyone's house': What ‘Ghachar Ghochar' taught me about the Indian middle class
There are books that yell their message out loud. And then there's Ghachar Ghochar (2015) – a whisper that gets under your skin and stays there. Vivek Shanbhag's slim, devastating novella, translated from Kannada to English by Srinath Perur, charts the rise of a Bengaluru family from modest means to quiet affluence as it peels back the polished veneer of a 'successful' Indian family made and unmade by money. The tale is not of triumph; it is an eerie, delicate dissection of how prosperity and upward mobility, so often seen as the reward for hard work, can slowly dissolve the very foundation it was built on: love, loyalty, and the ability to distinguish right from wrong. The unnamed narrator, mostly inert and almost invisible in his own life, sits in a cafe, retracing the arc of his family's transformation – from scraping by on a modest salary to riding high on the profits of the so-called head of the family – the uncle and his flourishing spice business. Their house is larger now, the money flows freely, and yet, something is rotting beneath the surface. The arrival of wealth brought a strange entropy: the family's moral compass begins to spin out of control, and the same people who once struggled together grow increasingly isolated, insular, manipulative, and morally opaque. The house is larger now, but darker; conversations are quieter, but heavier; love remains, but it has curdled. Shanbhag doesn't use overt confrontation or melodrama to depict the subtle reconfiguration of it. He does it in glances, silences, and most effectively, in the narrator's growing discomfort. The family members, now cushioned by privilege, begin to shift in subtle but alarming ways – exerting power, drawing boundaries, and rationalising every questionable action as justified or necessary. And crucially, they don't even realise it. They believe they are still good people. The narrator, however, does know. He watches this mutation unfold with an unease he cannot name and a complicity he cannot shake. It's this tension – between knowing and doing nothing – that gives the book its haunted pulse. The family's transformation is neither sudden nor shocking – it is slow, almost graceful. That is what makes it unsettling. One of the most haunting aspects of Ghachar Ghochar is how normal everything feels. The family never indulges in overt displays of power. There are no villains here, no screaming matches. Just a slow, insidious reshaping of values as money replaces meaning. Conversations become colder. People are kept in check. Everything is done 'for the family' – a phrase used as both shield and weapon. At one point, when the family discusses someone who challenged their ways, the ease with which they speak about manipulation – of protecting themselves, of silencing threats – is chilling. Nothing is said outright, but it doesn't need to be. Shanbhag excels at creating tension through what is not said. The story plays out largely within the walls of the family home and a small cafe where the narrator retreats for solitude. It's there that he encounters Vincent – the cafe's calm, enigmatic waiter who offers the only real wisdom in the book. Vincent doesn't say much, but his words are razor-sharp. Through one-liners and quiet observations, he functions as the narrator's unacknowledged conscience. The narrator's passivity becomes the book's greatest tension. He is not the instigator of harm, but he is a silent witness. He benefits from the system he knows is rotting. It's in this cafe that we also sense the narrator's internal split: he knows his family has lost its way, that the wealth has contorted their sense of right and wrong, but he cannot – or will not – stand apart from it. He is not evil, not cruel, but complicit. 'Holes in dosas in everyone's house, sir,' Vincent says early on. The narrator keeps connecting his one-liners to his life. Later, his final words to the narrator cut like a knife – not a rebuke, but a truth so clear it's impossible to forget. 'Sir, you may want to wash your hand. There's blood on it.' In a book filled with half-truths and rationalisations, Vincent's voice stands out: unambiguous, honest, and terrifying in its clarity. He never accuses, but he sees. It's a discomfort that mirrors the larger Indian middle-class condition: caught between old-world ideals and new-world aspirations, clinging to the illusion of moral high ground while making peace with transactional realities. The narrator's family is not unlike many real ones – seeking success without scrutiny, comfort without consequence. Their rise is not unusual. What makes it remarkable is how carefully Shanbhag shows its cost. The title itself, Ghachar Ghochar – a nonsensical phrase in the narrator's marriage, meaning 'tangled beyond repair' – is the perfect metaphor for what transpires. The characters are caught in a web of their own making, emotionally and ethically ensnared, but too ensconced in comfort to break free. Their wealth doesn't liberate them; it quietly erodes them. And worse, it convinces them they're better than they are. This is not an unfamiliar story in contemporary India, where class mobility often arrives with an invisible price tag. The nation's economic rise has birthed a new middle class eager to distinguish itself from both its working-class roots and the elite circles it now courts. Families like the narrator's became the new elite – not through lineage or education, but through enterprise. Yet with wealth came the fear of loss, the tightening of control, and the need to protect status at any cost. Shanbhag captures this with quiet brilliance: a family that once huddled together in adversity now builds walls to keep others out. The novella also offers a stark portrayal of how women are treated when they defy these invisible codes. The narrator's wife Anita – an outsider, observer, and moral compass – questions the family's choices, pushing him to confront what he's ignoring. But her voice becomes increasingly unwelcome in a household that has no appetite for dissent. Her honesty is a threat; her clarity, an intrusion. And eventually, like all inconvenient truths in tightly sealed worlds, she is pushed to the margins. A woman who arrives at the family home, seeking acknowledgment and dignity, is quickly painted as a threat. She is mistreated, but not violently – she is simply erased. That, Shanbhag seems to suggest, is often more dangerous. Violence leaves bruises, erasure leaves nothing. And so, when the climax comes, it is quiet. No confrontation, no moral reckoning. Just a moment of shattering realisation for the reader and the narrator, while the characters carry on, unaware or uncaring. It is a brilliant, brutal twist – one that lingers long after the last page, even a decade after the novella was published. Shanbhag's distinct Indian tragedy interrogates the costs of comfort, the ways we rationalise moral decay, and how the pursuit of wealth can make us strangers to ourselves. But it also asks: when the damage is done, when the knots are too tight to undo – what then? Some families fall apart. Others, like this one, stay together. But they become ghachar ghochar.
Irish Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Sakina's Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag: Another compact masterpiece
Sakina's Kiss Author : Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur ISBN-13 : 978-0-571-39083-0 Publisher : Faber & Faber Guideline Price : £12.99 Vivek Shanbhag's magnificent novella, Ghachar Ghochar, translated from the south Indian language of Kannada by Srinath Perur, and published in English in 2019, drew rapturous acclaim from far and wide. In these very pages, the critic Eileen Battersby wrote that it was 'possibly one of the finest literary works you will ever encounter'. Now Shanbhag and Perur are back with Sakina's Kiss, another compact masterpiece, about the uniquely human delusion of being in charge of our own lives. Our narrator is a middle-aged IT worker, a husband and father, living in a big city in India, possibly Bengaluru. He's a genial fellow who wishes trouble upon no one, secretly relies on guidance from self-help books and is ever willing to compromise for an easy life. Rather than insist that people call him Venkataramana, the name given to him by his parents in honour of the family deity, he's allowed his name to shrink in length over the years, and now goes by Venkat. 'After all,' he reasons to himself, 'when you want to win a swimming race, you don't dive in carrying weights.' READ MORE [ Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal: A novel of immense range that deserves a very wide readership Opens in new window ] He and his wife, Viji, think of themselves as modern people: although their marriage was arranged by their families, they like to say that, actually, only the meeting was arranged, and the rest they did for themselves. After all, they liked each other right from the beginning, and they do seem to be a good match: on the first night of their honeymoon, the newly-weds open their suitcases to discover they have each secretly brought a copy of the exact same self-help book entitled – what else? – Living in Harmony. If it seems like a meet-cute Disney moment, that's because it is, and the author is way ahead of you. A knock on the door sets the novel in motion: two young men, university students, want to speak to the couple's daughter, Rekha. But she is out of town, uncontactable by mobile, and the men – thugs, as we soon see – aren't too happy about it. Ominous shadows from a dark underworld soon threaten to disrupt Venkat's peaceful life, and it remains to be seen whether his mantras will be of any help. By turns comic and unsettling, this is another triumph from Shanbhag.
