This book was originally written in Kannada but has not lost any of its essence in translation and so kudos to Srinath Perur who translated it to English. It’s a psychological drama centred around a household comprising the unnamed narrator, his parents, uncle, separated sister and his wife. The story deals with the sudden shift of the family from poverty to wealth and the magnification of the already existing dysfunction that the wealth brings about — “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” as the narrator points out at some point in the story.
Ghachar Ghochar is a nonsensical phrase made up by a couple of the story’s protagonists to suggest the hopeless entanglement of a loose string. It captures the crux of the story as feelings of love, anger, greed, power, and fear get mired with each other leading to the slow downward spiral in many of the characters’ morals. There is enough of each character to feel sorry about and yet enough to despise them. Despite being a very short book and despite being set in very simple surroundings, there’s an underlying current of foreboding and darkness throughout the book. This is captured beautifully in a chapter on the family’s battle against an invasion of ants, making them “a family that took satisfaction in the destruction of ants”.
The key thing that struck me about the book was the simplicity yet profundity of Shanbhag’s writing in Ghachar Ghochar. While the book can be read easily in less than 2 hours, there is enough to relish while reading the book and enough to contemplate after completing the book. As that narrator expressed, “words after all are nothing by themselves. They burst into meaning only in the minds they’ve entered.”
Pros: Simply yet wonderfully written, short
Cons: Nothing really
