ONE STORY, MANY SIDES
A book that I read six years later for my weekly posts stunned me, yet again. This Kannada novella makes us reflect on the things families say—and never say—in order to keep the peace.
The waiter at the city’s Coffee House in Vivek Shanbhag’s GHACHAR GHOCHAR is a man called Vincent. He seems omniscient. He is smooth. Through his words we learn that every story in the world will always have many sides. With this eerie beginning, we glide into the abyss of this Kannada novella whose breathtaking translation into English is authored by translator Srinath Perur.
Ever since I read it several years ago, I’ve felt that GHACHAR GHOCHAR is one of the most gripping tales I’ve read in my lifetime. Spare as it is, this story packs so much punch in its 115 pages that readers know, even as they finish it for the nth time, that they’ll probably read it at least once more. This is a work we read holding a different lens every time; each iteration exposes another layer that seemed previously hidden. It’s masterful in its storytelling, pacing and curation of details. What Shanbhag also seems to do so effortlessly is the allotment of space to details. Which moments of a narrative must be expanded and shown in painful detail? Which must be told quickly—with an eye on the big picture?
The story centers around the life of a lower middle class family of five whose beginnings in the city were ordinary. This family is tight-knit, consisting of a father, a mother, a son (the narrator whose namelessness adds to the pathos), a daughter named Malati and an uncle called Chikkappa who is the father’s younger brother. Even though the family barely makes ends meet, they are sufficiently happy with fond nicknames for one another.
It’s true what they say—it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that controls us. When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us. Money had swept us up and flung us in the midst of a whirlwind.
This family is suddenly catapulted into the realm of the crass bourgeoisie soon after Chikkappa starts a business in spice packaging. They are now able to afford much more and, accordingly, they move into an affluent neighborhood. Now they don’t necessarily consult each other on the things they wish to buy. The balance of power now shifts. Chikkappa is the man around whom life revolves for he is the breadwinner and the person to whom they owe their life of luxury. He calls the shots whether or not the rest of family approves.
On the path to a dream life what often falls by the wayside, however, is ethical clarity. The slow crumbling of the value system of this household is shown, graphically, as an infestation by ants. Shanbhag spends several pages describing the ways in which ants get into everything inside the house. They’re even to be found inside a compass box.
None of us remembers when exactly the ant menace started. In the beginning, we’d spot an ant here and there, but after a while they took over the house. There was nothing to be done without knowing where they came from, and this was impossible because they were everywhere. Amma, who had to spend the whole day with them, would say, “They’re not ants. They’re evil spirits come here in disguise.”
The premonition of the mother is not unjustified for this is a pivotal moment in this brilliant story. When things go wrong inside a family, they never happen overnight. The decay often begins at the very foundations of a home and events in the present often are anchored in seemingly minor incidents in the distant past. It’s the manner in which family members stop communicating—or continue to communicate—that slowly cleaves a home. The more that’s left unsaid, the more there is to be aired, picked apart, analyzed, debated—and, hopefully, resolved. For the family in Shanbhag’s story, what matters, above all, is its survival and self-preservation. So nothing is aired.
As the five of them try to adjust to their new way of life, things become “ghachar ghochar.” The term coined in this novel alludes to something that’s tangled beyond repair, a knot that can't be untied. The only man with a conscience is the father who clearly sees the rot but he is as helpless as he is powerless and spineless. As ants ransack their home, the brother and sister Malati certainly have no qualms at all about quashing ants to death even when they are not in their way. It’s the cavalier and callous attitude of the family members towards another life in the world—while preserving one’s own position in the hierarchy—that makes GHACHAR GHOCHAR such a compelling read.
In such a family where no one challenges the powerful Chikappa enters a daughter-in-law named Anita who will never stop asking questions or drilling down to point out the problems. On their honeymoon, Anita asks her husband, our narrator, why he wanted, instinctively, to kill an innocuous ant that was making its way on a window sill in their hotel room. She’s snarky and honest. Some of the best moments of this story feature Anita and her vitriolic comebacks. As she begins to challenge other members of the family and points out their hypocrisies, it becomes ever so clear that she, in the words of her husband, has a “suicidal forthrightness“ that seeks to destroy everyone “along with herself.”
Anita was never shy of speaking her mind, especially when she disagreed with something that was happening around her. That was the nature of her upbringing. The unwritten rules of our house were the very opposite. We went on as if nothing had happened. For instance, no one objected to anything Chikkappa did or said, especially after we moved to the new house.
What might happen to someone like Anita who does not belong? That is the crux of the story and one that keeps our eyeballs fixed onto the page. As Vincent the waiter says at the opening of GHACHAR GHOCHAR, there are always many sides to a story depending on one’s view of the world. By the time we reach the end of this sinister tale, we must remember the other thing that Vincent says, that blood is most certainly thicker than water.
“Once again, reading beyond our tiny borders shows us what we’ve been missing, and proves the necessity of translation for a dynamic literary culture: Ghachar Ghochar is both fascinatingly different from much Indian writing in English, and provides a masterclass in crafting, particularly on the power of leaving things unsaid. In fewer than 28,000 words, Vivek Shanbhag weaves a web of suggestion and implication, to be read with a sense of mounting unease.”
~~~ Review by Deborah Smith for The Guardian