Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Book Review)

Satire has an engrossing value, because it invites you to laugh at yourself without feeling offended. It is a form of humour considered higher than any other type because, to be able to create great satire, one must be blessed with multiple perspectives, often contradicting, yet profound in their own rights, all at the same time. But somewhere, Satire has become confused with something of a lesser degree, that neither enlightens, nor instructs, yet happens to create an impression of levity, couched in a narrative promising social value and collective reflection. “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard” by Kiran Desai has fallen into that categorization, though it is not clear to me if the previous readers unknowingly anointed the book with that label or if the publishers wanted the book to be labelled exactly that. Regardless of how that impression came about, it is anything but that. Moreover, the promised humour hovered around few inane developments, not even believably ridiculous to become worthy of admiration.

Satire is no monkey business.

Perhaps, the book has been wrongly considered as a satire on provincial India. Its description, without the literary fluff as 'a simple story based in provincial India a la Malgudi Days' would have done better justice to reader’s expectations from it. Nonetheless, the language has a certain freshness to it and effuses earnestness of a young author who is being sincere to herself. The start, atleast, had quite a few good beautiful metaphors that painted, ‘Shahkot’ and its denizens as a light no-frills water colours’ painting and sometimes, (yes, unfortunately, only sometimes) brought out provincially accurate sartorial imageries like when, ‘she was encased in layers of shiny material, like a large expensive toffee’. Such gems, which were realistic and yet humorous in their expression, were far few in between to qualify the book into a satirical mirror to provincial Indian society. The already dull plot-line had started to become loose despite a very interesting start when Sampath decided to run away from the drabness of ordinary provincial life, just to be left alone to his aimless introspections. Yet, it was not a completely lost affair, at least in spirit-if not in letters, in portraying our mindless craze for spiritual babas and their incredulous recipes for spiritual salvations in the manner Sampath became the 'tree baba' and invited national spotlight on himself. He was ready with his simple proverbs too, which were adopted by the mesmerized folks as life hacks much similar to those being offered by the Kripa Baba of our times; ‘add lemons to milk and it will become sour’. Also surprisingly, despite very weak characterizations of almost everyone in the story, Sampath had some really genuine nuggets of wisdom to offer as common sensical adages, profundity of which stood out as oysters on a vegetarian menu.

The story revealed all the cards it had to show quite early enough and from there on, it lost the plot. Regrettably and annoyingly it completely digressed into supporting character’s mini escapades, which I found irritatingly irrelevant to the purported main event and its unfolding. Perhaps, those mini escapades might have become a window into the lives of those living in the provinces, but lack of any believable traits and insights completely shabbied any such possibility, if at all that had been intended. Kulfi, (who is a ‘Chawla’ by the way) is said to have cooked almost every living creature found in the forests from mongooses, squirrels, hoopoes and…porcupines? (for god’s sake). Unless you are a Chinese immigrant or a member of an obscure sylvan tribe, an Indian will hardly ever get himself near to those animals served on a plate, much less a ‘Chawla’ in an apparently North Indian province.

Story developments also seemed unreal and not inter-locked convincingly. This is not being said to rail against hyper-realistic plots, but being uttered as a comment on writing that seems bankrupt when it has to rely on devices like, ‘Fortunately, so and so happened’, ‘Luckily, it went that way’ and so on, in order to move the plot ahead. The Story’s tail suffered from a very contrived attempt to create a flashpoint of laughter inducing events but ended up appearing as a very childish and amateurish attempt at arriving at nothing. Sampath, who started as someone genuinely suffering from a personal crisis, looking to tread the unbeaten path and find peace in his own ways, eventually turns into a moronic shadow whose later appearances come imbued with cringe-worthy views haphazardly made contrarian to project a semblance of literary balance. This book read like Indian Government’s 5 year plans, great and exciting to start, but difficult to stick with, and disappointing towards the end.

Image from here.