#BookReview ; Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag

From a cramped, ant-infested house to a spacious bungalow, a family finds itself making a transition in many ways. The narrator, a sensitive young man, is numbed by the swirl around him. All he can do is flee every day to an old-world cafe, where he seeks solace from an oracular waiter. As members of the family realign their equations and desires, new strands are knotted, others come apart, and conflict brews dangerously in the background.

Masterfully translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, Ghachar Ghochar is a suspenseful, playful and ultimately menacing story about the shifting consequences of success.

Ghachar Ghochar is a fiction written in Kannada by Vivek Shanbhag, translated into English by Srinath Perur & published by Harper Perennial. The author has published 5 short-story collections, 3 novels & 2 plays, and edited 2 anthologies, one of which is in English. Srinath Perur writes on a variety of subjects, often to do with travel or science. He is the author of the travelogue If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai.

The story revolves around the narrator & his family, we follow their journey from an ant-infested 4 room house to a large bungalow. We get to know Amma & Appa parents of the narrator, Amma basically controls the household throughout the book while we see a shift in Appa’s character. Then we meet Malati, narrator’s sister & Chikappa, the younger brother of narrator’s father. Both went through drastic changes in their lives in different ways. At last there’s Anita, the wife of the narrator who is a fierce woman who speaks her mind out loud. As the family gets rich eventually but in a short period of time, a closely knit family experiences different changes in their lifestyles. Get this book in order to experience a story which will indeed touch every single one of us,

First of all, let me address the elephant in the room & that is the title of this book as well as the cover and let me tell you that when you’re done with this book it’ll all make sense. Honestly this is one of the few books where both the cover & title makes so much sense. All the characters are so believable that it’s uncanny, we get to see how the dynamics in the household changes and how each character changes their perception accordingly. We also see how greed in a family is made a priority over everything. This book is basically a window into the lives of innumerous families & their collective psyche. Something I haven’t read in a long time & deserve to be read by everyone.