"Ghachar Ghochar" by Vivek Shanbhag

 

This beautiful jewel of a novella describes the corrosive effect of wealth on the inter-relationships within a family. "Ghachar ghochar", we discover, is a made up word to describe an entanglement, a snarled and knotted web of entwined threads.

The storyline itself is tangled as the narrator jumps around chronologically, starting in the present tense and then telling his story in the past. It is always his story and therefore coloured by his preconceptions and shaped by the limitations of his perceptions. 

The family consists of father Appa and mother Amma, his sister Malati and the anonymous male narrator, and their uncle Chikkappa; clearly Appa, Amma and Chikkappa mean Father, Mother and Uncle; we do not learn their names. In this way the family becomes generic and the story becomes a metaphor for us all.

To start with, the family rely on the income of Appa, who works hard and conscientiously as a salesman. When he is made redundant, Chikkappa takes over as breadwinner, using Appa's redundancy money and his own business acumen to found a company retailing spices. The family becomes wealthy ... and the wealth corrodes their inter-relationships. This becomes especially apparent when Malati and the narrator marry. There are also hints that Chikkappa has a hidden, possibly darker side to him. There is a potentially sinister but ambiguous ending.

What delighted me about the story is the way it was made absolutely real by the details - the clothing of the waiter, Vincent, the spillage of the masoor dal - and at the same time so much of the narrative is made up from suggestions, oblique hints and implications which the reader must piece together to understand what might be - might be - going on. 

It's also a masterpiece of metaphor. The family is invaded by ants - a species famous for being organised closely interlinked - and become inured to killing them. The spilling of the masoor dal suggests secrets being brought into the open.

It's a tour de force of subtext with some beautifully buried, often symbolic, foreshadowing.

Selected quotes:

• “One story, many sides.” (Ch 1)
• “Who's to say the gods cannot take the form of a waiter when they choose to visit us?” (Ch 1)
• "I knew that tea shouldn't lead to a broken arm, or a forgotten key to murder. It wasn't about the tea of the key: the last strands of a relationship can snap from a single glance or a moment of silence." (Ch 1)
• “The whole family stuck together, walking like a single body across the tightrope of our circumstances.” (Ch 2)
• “We thought of the family as being interdependent: a person who spent money was also taking it away from the others.” (Ch 5)
• “It's not we who control money, it's the money that controls us.” (Ch 5)
• “There's a vast difference between the moral underpinnings of a business family and the household of a salaried teacher.” (Ch 6)
• “Whatever fragrance the whole wardrobe had was missing in the individual clothes it held.” (Ch 7)
• “Those types who will point out the mustard seed under your feet, but a blind to the pumpkin beneath them.” (Ch 7)

September 2026; 118 pages
First published in India (written in Kannada) in 2013
My paperback edition, translated into English by Srinath Perur, was issued in 2018.
I discovered this book from a recommendation from @maxpuffins on BlueSky; he has published a review on his substack blog which is well worth a read.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God