I picked this book up a few days back at the Strand Book Stall, Bangalore, on the advise of a friend who’d been to the reading at the Leela. Three hundred and odd bucks down and I had what seemed like 700 pages bound in a paperback. When you’ve read as much as I have, which isn’t saying much, you’d have built this image in your mind about authors or genres.
Ludlum: plot, Forsyth: detail, classics: emotion, bla bla bla. And somewhere there was: Indian Author: feeble attempts at humor, no relation to my life. (Too much Khuswant singh? Perhaps. And a little bit of Arundhati Roy.) (I mean the book she wrote, don’t get any ideas) Anyways, this book changed that opinion quite dramatically. Ajit Saldanha is downright funny and surprisingly relevant.
The book is a collection of short stories and articles penned over a period of...well, a long time. The title talks about some of them - stories about his larger-than-usual-but-not-if-you’re-mangy family. An extensive collection of aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews appear, and each one of them, in true mangalorean tradition, has a hilarious story attached. Now, having studied near Mangalore myself and having a gazillion relatives there, you might think I’m biased. But I connected, in the non-technical sense of the word, to the family that openly glorified all things American, to the ’’no sex we’re indians’’ diatribe, to the ignorance of someone who would walk up to geet sethi and ask him if he was one of Prasad Bidappa’s models.
And to even some of the atrocious puns that were, if you will excuse the same level of atrociousness, dished out by the food critic. His ’’putting kai, kadhal and rummance’’ is a story you shouldn’t read in public; there is a certain discomfort associated with uncontrollable guffaws and snorts. I still haven’t finished the book. But I’ve decided it ranks at the level of the Dave Barry books - except with an Indian context.
And I actually met Ajit at a comedy show - and he was pretty cool about my glorification of what seemed to me as the best book by an Indian. Ok, sure, there are some minor grammatical errors but that, I think, is an even better reflection of the global Indian, don’t you think?