Elaborate eggshells

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

by Kiran Desai

Viking Penguin India, New Delhi, 1998

209 pp

Like the monkeys in this fictional Lguava orchard, Kiran Desais new book is creating a lot of fuss over nothing. Sampath Chawla, its hapless protagonist, is intended as a tragicomic hero: an unemployed postal clerk-turned-ersatz holy man. The story follows his meandering path as he blithely loses his job, climbs a guava tree, and attracts a bevy of human and animal followers. Desai tells the tale deftly enough. What she fails to do along the way is give her readers a reason to care about Sampath or any of the other "colorful" characters surrounding him.

Desai presents Sampath as a Forrest Gump-like soul who lives in his own hyper-sensate world. "All around him, his family lay and snored: his father, mother, grandmother, and his younger sister, Pinky, swathed in quantities of flowered organza. Rrrrr. Rrrrr. Phurrrr. Wheeeeee. Rrrrrrr. What a racket! Sampath listened to each hostile inhalation. Even in sleep, he thought, disgusted, his family showed themselves incapable of pleasant displays of consideration."

He finds bliss at his bosss daughters wedding, where he steals into her changing room. He relishes "the scents of musk, of mothballs, marigolds, and baby powder. Of sandal-wood oil. Oh scented world! He felt his heart grow light. He held the fabrics to his cheek, let their slippery weight fall from one hand to the other and slide over his arms. He swathed lengths of pink and green and turmeric yellow about himself until he looked like a box of sweets wrapped up for the Diwali season."

Sampaths shedding of his wrappings is intended as high comedy but reads like laboured slapstick. "Sampath climbed deftly on to the highest tier of the fountain and, in one swift movement, lowered both his trousers and his underpants. His back to the crowd, he stuck his brown behind up into the air and wiggled it wildly in an ecstatic appreciation of the evenings entertainment he has just provided." The book is full of such misadventures at work, with his family, and in the guava tree, where Sampath finally finds a bit of peace and recognition.

As a character, however, Sampath is so opaque, inert and uncommunicative that it is impossible to connect with him at any level. He rarely talks to anyone, and his interior monologues betray little more than annoyance or confusion. "How he hated his life. It was a never-ending flow of misery. It was a prison he had been born into. The one time he had a little bit of fun, he was curtailed and punished. He was born unlucky, thats what it was." Such meagre glimpses into Sampaths character reveal nothing deeper than what everyone around him must see – a misfit who is singularly ill-equipped to deal with life outside the branches of his guava tree.

Desai manages to keep the story moving only by skitting from one stunning image to the next. "Sampaths concentration sharpened like a knife at all the places where his bones pressed against the hard floor"; "the sauces were full of strange hints and dark undercurrents, leaving you on firm ground one moment, dragging you under the next"; " finely powdered beetles with kohl-rimmed eyes and clown-faced caterpillars with round noses, false beards and foolish feet." Descriptions like these are strewn about the pages like so many elaborately painted eggshells, beautiful yet insubstantial.

A host of stock characters try vainly to capture the readers attention as it wanders away from Sampath: the indulgent grandmother with a home-made remedy for every ill; a food-obsessed mother whose curries fill the orchard with uncate-gorisable smells; the imperious father guarding his sons career prospects; chamchas (yes-men) in the local IAS cadre; and even the town itself. Shahkot is a hodgepodge of urban notions about small country towns, where superstition substitutes for thought and every scene is a spectacle.

Only one member of this rainbow coalition of colourful characters seems to own a human core -Sampaths sister, Pinky. When she becomes enamoured of a young icecream vendor at the local movie house, she bites off a piece of his ear in a Tyson-esque display of passion. Her letter of apology offers the only sincerely funny lines in what is supposed to be a comic novel: "I am so sorry to have bitten your ear. But it was done only out of affection. Please understand, the sight of you filled my heart with so much emotion, but it unfortunately came out in the wrong way. Heres wishing you a speedy recovery."

Here, at last, Desai gets into the skin of her character. Unfortunately, the balance of this book is a catalogue of one-dimensional eccentrics and second-hand emotion – beautifully written but bloodless.