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Indian Express
20 hours ago
- 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.
Indian Express
04-07-2025
- General
- Indian Express
7 must-read translated Indian novels that retain their soul
Written By Prachi Mishra In India, the landscape changes every few hundred kilometres, and so does the language. A phrase uttered in one village might sound completely different a district away. At times, it's a new dialect. At times, it is an entirely new language. Thus, in a nation woven together by its multilingualism, translation is not merely a creative decision; it's a cultural imperative. But with each act of translation, there is a silent risk attached to it, the risk of something slipping between the cracks. It may mean losing nuance, humour, agony, the rhythm of a sentence or simply the weight of a silence. But, as Ken Liu reminds us, 'Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.' And that's exactly why, when translation succeeds, it is rather more than ability. It is more like alchemy. Let us take a look at few Indian books that have traversed linguistic boundaries without diluting their emotional and literary content. Srinath Perur translated this book from Kannada to English in 2015. Ghachar Ghochar shows how unexpected wealth changes a family in ways people don't notice. The story's main character, who doesn't have a name, lives well in Bangalore now. He sees how money breaks down his family's sense of right and wrong. The made-up phrase 'ghachar ghochar' means a mix of feelings, values, and how people connect. Shanbhag writes without extra words, and Perur keeps this style in the translation. This helps readers feel the tight calm mood of the book. The main character asks, ''When the house is on fire, do you waste time chasing rats?' In just over 100 pages, this book shows how respectability can conceal rot, cutting straight to the heart of familial dysfunction. Against the backdrop of Partition, Tamas is a sobering portrayal of how communal violence is engineered. Translated into Hindi and published in 1974, the novel begins with the sight of a pig's carcass hurled outside a mosque, a minor action that has disastrous fallout. Bhisham Sahni himself translated the book into English so that nothing was lost in terms of tone or emotion. Through various characters – Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and colonial officials, he reveals how riots are more planned and less spontaneous. 'The riots had not erupted,' he writes, 'they had been ignited.' With understated prose and unflinching honesty, Tamas remains one of the most haunting literary documents of Partition. Published in 1974, With the translation into English by Samik Bandyopadhyay, the novella stands as an intimate portrait of political violence that soon casts an enormous shadow across the reader's consciousness. Written in Bengali, it begins with Sujata, a middle-class homemaker, being asked to visit a morgue to identify her son who was murdered for being with the Naxalite movement and was given the designation, 'Corpse No. 1084.' Saddened, Sujata embarks on questioning her own position and privilege; she questions inaction on her part as well as society's gruesome acceptance of this injustice. 'I gave him birth. And the state gave him death,' she says, encapsulating the novel's emotional and political weight. The translation is stark and elegant, echoing Mahasweta Devi's fiery critique of state repression and class apathy. Moustache, a dark folk story set in Kerala's backwaters first came out in Malayalam in 2013. Jayasree Kalathil translated it later. The book tells the story of a man from a lower caste who grows a moustache. This facial hair, a symbol of upper-caste male power, causes wonder, jealousy, and dread. As the moustache gets bigger – like something out of a myth – Hareesh looks at caste, manhood, and fighting back. He does this through a dreamlike tale full of rich details. Kalathil's translation won the JCB Prize for Literature in 2020. People praised it for keeping the poetic feel and political punch of the original work. In the book, the moustache 'comes to life – growing rebellion.' By doing this, it becomes a story about getting back one's honor. This peculiar short Bengali novella from 1993, which Arunava Sinha translated to English, features a deceased aunt who lingers in the family's thoughts, both as a spirit and a symbol of resistance. The tale intertwines the experiences of women across three generations as they grapple with rich male dominance, and the weight of tradition. Mukhopadhyay's writing has a whimsical touch but also contains many depths blending the with everyday gender bias and pointed social commentary. Sinha's translation keeps the wit and closeness while bringing out its feminist undertones. 'It's not death that scares me,' says the aunt, 'it's forgetting.' It is a book that keeps reverberating after the slim volume is set down. Published for the first time in 1889, Indulekha is regarded as the first full-fledged Malayalam novel and continues to be remarkably forward-thinking for its era. Written in the midst of British colonial times, it is a narrative of an educated, smart Nair woman who goes against the norms to exercise her right to choose. O. Chandu Menon's incisively ironic voice and social commentary come into English translation through Anitha Devasia, whose translation maintains the Victorian-era vocabulary but brings the text to within reach of contemporary readers. The novel lightly challenges orthodoxy without discounting cultural identity. Its eponymous heroine's announcement, 'A woman with learning is feared by men who do not understand her', rings like a call across the ages. The Bride, written in Maithili in the 1950s, is both comical and sharp in its satirical thrust from the rural heart of Bihar. Harimohan Jha satirizes social customs of dowry, arranged marriages, and Brahmanical pride through the narrative of an overloaded scholar trying to cope with the absurdities of wedding negotiations. Translated into English by Lalit Kumar, the novel's humor and cultural particularity survive translation without sacrificing readability. Its appeal lies in how lightly it wears its satire, never compromising humor for sermonizing. 'Perhaps you know Panini's grammar,' remarks one of them, 'but unless you know how to please your wife's father, you are lost.' This Maithili gem is gently comic, sharply observed, and deeply rooted in cultural detail. In a land of many voices, these eight books remind us that translation is not just an act of language, but also an act of faith. When done with devotion, it enables stories to traverse not only geography but into new hearts, new readers, and new lives. Because the finest stories, wherever they start, need to be heard everywhere.
