GHACHAR GHOCHAR

''It''s true what they say - it''s not we who control * it''s the * that controls us. When there''s only a little it behaves meekly; when it grows it becomes brash and has its way with us.''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.Vivek Shanbhag is an Indian Chekov illuminating the romantic and financial tensions in middle-class urban India with a doctor''s precision and sensitivity. Here is an India that is immediately recognizable to Indians not an exotic concoction fabricated for a foreign audience. Ghachar Ghochar kept me riveted from start to finish. Suketu MehtaVivek Shanbhag writes engagingly about the entrapments and petty tyrannies of Indian family life. There''s a little of R.K. Narayan in him - a little of Chekhov too. He has a fine comic touch but he is dealing in personal disasters. Ian JackA remarkable novel about the fragile civilities of bourgeois life. The reader becomes absorbed in the unforgiving self-knowledge and expansive humanity contained in every page. Amit Chaudhuri