HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD BY KIRAN DESAI – A REVIEW
India has often been depicted as a mystic land of Sadhus, strange magic charms, spicy exotic cuisine and intricate religious rituals by the West. Kiran Desai’s absorbing book is a brilliant satire that makes light of these theories in a comical manner. A satire that has social, political, economical, filial and even spiritual dimensions wrapped in layers of absurd humor with a dash of fantasy, the book raises some significant questions on the world and it’s mad ways that applies not only to the fictitious town of Shahkot, but equally to any other part of India.
The plot is simple - Sampath Chawla, the main protagonist is a dull young man whose absolute lack of common sense and ambition is made up for by his fertile imagination and deliriously free spirit that lead him to seek asylum in a guava tree in an abandoned guava orchard when he feels that life is going out of control.
But madness is almost a hereditary trait of the Chawla family – Sampath’s mother Kulfi is obsessed with food in it’s various forms, his ambitious father Mr.Chawla is obsessed with money and his sister Pinky is a droll and foolish girl infatuated with the Hungry Hop Kwality ice cream boy.
Having spent his days as a post office clerk reading the town’s incoming mail, Sampath finds it easy to pose as a clairvoyant holy man, a situation of which his family promptly takes advantage. He is joined by a group of monkeys on the treetop and earns the title of ‘Monkey Baba’ - Devotees start flocking to Shahkot to see the ‘Baba’ and Mr.Chawla seizes the opportunity to make some fast money out of the situation. But things take a crazy turn as the monkeys turn alcoholic, and pose a threat to the devotees’ conglomeration as well as Sampath’s family camping at the foot of the tree.
Different people offer a variety of solutions for eliminating the monkey menace and Sampath finds himself in an obscure predicament. Things take an even more bizarre and outlandish turn as Pinky plans to elope with the ice cream boy, and Kulfi gets determined to catch and cook a monkey before they are chased away. All these events and more culminate in an extremely amusing medley of a climax, and an abrupt ending that has shades of fantasy.
Amidst such fun-filled incidents and vivid descriptions of sporadic monsoons arriving late on summer-exhausted Shahkot, idyllic orchards bordering the hills outside the town and fantastic cooking with never-heard-of recipes, Ms.Desai brings out the various hues and flavours of human character. Several thought-provoking messages are dispersed throughout the book in a subtle manner making it much more than a simple light-hearted comedy.
Ms.Desai has a remarkable gift for humour that sparkles throughout the book – The sections highlighting the desirable qualities of an Indian bride, Pinky’s and Ammaji’s adventure with the notorious cinema monkey that takes them both a merry chase around the streets holding ice creams and Ammaji’s dentures in tow and Pinky’s ludicrous affair with Hungry Hop among others are sure to have the reader in splits of laughter.
A protagonist with a difference who seeks nothing except solitude in a shady spot, his eccentric family members, hypochondriac officials, prosaic civil servants, lackadaisical postmasters, a bunch of gullible ‘devotees’ and a group of alcoholic monkeys together create an extremely delightful tale that transports the reader to a world where life is slow, time moves at its own pace and yet reflects the vagaries of existence in the present day with all of it’s plastic nuances.
Note: I had written the above review in Meghdutam - https:// https://meghdutam.com/