IndiaStar: A Literary-Art Magazine

--book review--

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

by Kiran Desai

(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998)
209 pages, $22

 

Reviewed by Sonoo Singh

[Editor's intro: Soono Singh is a
Chandigarh-based writer.
She received an M.A. in English
from Punjab University. -- C.J.S. Wallia]

 

Leafing through Kiran Desai's debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava
Orchard, is like sipping cool, tangy lemonade in the sweltering summer
sun. Refreshing and succulent like green guavas of the orchard that Desai
has created, the novel once again confirms that Indian writing in English
has come to stay.

Daughter of the distinguished Indo-English writer Anita Desai, Kiran
does not share the same intensity that her mother weaves in her
potent tales. But she does not disappoint in producing a maddeningly
entertaining novel. Not that the strains of the umbilical chord is negated
totally in Kiran Desai's writing.

The novel introduces the sleepy town of Shahkot, which becomes alive
when Sampath Chawla, a middle-class purposeless post-office clerk, tries
to escape his repeated failures by climbing a guava tree and gaining
recognition as a hermit.

The guava orchard becomes the epicenter of all the characters. The
'hullabaloo' starts when everyone -- from his family, to the people of
Shahkot town, to the monkeys -- tries to make an eventful performance out
of the hermit perched atop the guava tree! Reminds one of Shakespeare's
'Hamlet': "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."

Consider this in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard:
"... but Kulfi stretched out farther and farther until the rain took up all
the space inside her head. It seized her brain, massaged and incorporated
her intothe watery sounds, until she felt that she herself might turn to storm
and disappear in this blowing, this growling, this lightning flutter quick as
a moth's wing." And from Anita Desai's "Where Shall We Go This Summer":
"How long would it continue like this, she wondered...If it stayed like this
long enough, without a disturbance, without an interruption, perhaps the
slowness, the monotony of the regular tides would enter one's very veins,
one's blood would begin to flow to their measure and one would adjust
to a life in which there was never any change but the expected one of the
tide receding and the tide advancing."

The novel, which was excerpted in the New Yorker, is something of a
roller-coaster ride, in which the world seems turned topsy-turvy, and
the dizzy feeling thereafter inertly tingles the fibres on the insides.

The novel's strength is the steady fluidity in which the story unfolds itself
by the use of brilliantly lucid images, along with a distinct choice of
unaffected words and phrases, and a 'bratish' set of characters. The author
has handled the 'big-time dreams' of a middle-class family with a keen
sense of humor. Who hasn't heard a father talking thus to the over-indulgent
grandmother in the house: "What do you care if the sky falls on your
grandson's head so long as he has a gulab jamun is his mouth?"

It is fascinating to go through the antics of a post-office clerk who spends
his free time reading the mail of thepeople of Shahkot, and after climbing
atop the guava tree reveals interesting facets to those same people. They start
referring to him as "Baba" the saint. Equally engaging are other characters:
the Baba's Sister, Pinky, who finds delight in biting the cheeks or tweaking
the bottoms of men she fancies; the mother, Kulfi, who had enormous
cravings for food during the time of her pregnancy, and whose sole passion
in life now is to feed her son Sampath with exotic dishes, complete with
ingredients like asafoetida, quail eggs, nasturtium leaves and cicada orchids!
The egocentric Kulfi, who goes about life in a her mysterious ways, appears
to be an Anita Desai character -- with her celebration ofher whimsical manners.

The only stereotypical character in the novel is the father, Mr.Chawla.
Reminiscent of middle-class fathers, he is a government employee, who
exercises regularly, shows his concern for his children's future, but remains
aloof from the extraordinary oddities of life around him. He is the floating
buoy of the novel, becoming the connecting link between his meditative son,
Sampath -- now a revered hermit --and the people and events that create the
clutter in the guava orchard.

The reader begins to feel the speed and buoyancy at which the turn of
events take place in the 209-page novel from the very moment Sampath
tries seeking respite from his worldly affairs by making a guava tree his
habitat along with the monkeys.

Once Sampath Chawla settles down in the guava tree, he is joined by a
horde of followers, including his family who try to commercialize his presence
atop the tree. And then follows a horde of businessmen who endeavour to
sell their wares, ranging from toothpaste to mosquito repellents, to the
'trustful tourists' of the orchard. After the dreaded monkeys of the town
also join him in the tree, Sampath Chawla is then re-christened as "Monkey Baba."

But all is not well, once the man and the animals start living together. Attracted
to the taste of liquor, the monkeys create an uproar in and around the orchard
in their hunt for more liquor. It is then that the hullabaloo begins with everybody
-- from the common civilian, to the upright militarywallahs, to the paunchy
police -- trying to get rid of the monkey menace. Currents of an impending
chaos are felt throughout the novel.

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard should bepicked up on a lazy summer
afternoon. As the world enjoys the summer siesta, read about the town of
Shahkot and listen to a 'Monkey Baba' spewing forth words of wisdom:
"If you have a monkey, you will not get lice. To make curd, don't unsettle
the milk. Does a pond clean the mud at its bottom? Does the rain wash the sky?
As is the wood, is the meat cooked upon it."