Ghachar Ghochar

By: Vivek Shanbhag, Srinath Perur - translation

Narrated by: Neil Shah

Bangalore, present day. A young man's close-knit family is nearly destitute when his uncle founds a successful spice company, changing their fortunes overnight. As they move from a cramped, ant-infested shack to a larger house and try to adjust to a new way of life, allegiances realign; marriages are arranged and begin to falter; and conflict brews ominously in the background. Things become "ghachar ghochar" - a nonsense phrase uttered by one of the characters that comes to mean something tangled beyond repair, a knot that can't be untied.

Elegantly written and punctuated by moments of unexpected warmth and humor, Ghachar Ghochar is a quietly enthralling, deeply unsettling novel about the shifting meanings - and consequences - of financial gain in contemporary India.

©2017 Vivek Shanbhag (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Wonderfully Engaging Family Drama From South India

This novella shows what a talented fiction writer can do. The family drama that plays out within this six member South Indian will stick with me for a long time. It's left for the reader to decide whether an actual murder takes place or is purely aspirational. You decide.

Good but feels incomplete and heavily patriarchal

The nuances of a middle class family from Bangalore is very nicely represented in this book, it is nostalgic. But why does Suhasini show up at their house, what's the deal between her and Chikappa, why does the protagonist think about Anita so negatively even though he occasionally admits that she's right. I don't know if the author meant to show a contrast between the protagonist's character in the beginning and the end, I couldn't see it. It kind of felt like this was a loser, who couldn't stand up to even for himself (much less, his wife). Not sure if this is really the kind of books we should be reading at such precarious times.

Short, with Room for Development

Ghachar Ghochar is a very short and darkly comic novel that explores the problems a family encounters when making the socioeconomic leap from scraping by to being well off. The unnamed narrator lives in a small house in Bangalore with his parents, sister, and uncle. When his father loses his job, he decides to risk it all and start his own spice company with his younger brother. They purchase large amounts of spices wholesale and repackage them in smaller, more convenient packets. The business is successful, the family moves to a larger home, and the son collects a comfortable monthly salary for doing nothing at all.

But the change in status is not totally positive. The family members that struggled together are now more often at one another's throats, and they seem to have more ties to the objects they purchase than to one another. When the narrator marries the girl of his dreams, trouble rears its ugly head. Anita is appalled to learn that her husband doesn't really work; how can a man have any pride or sense of identity if all he does is sit around and rely on his family's money and a future inheritance? She questions the ethics of his shady uncle and the family's cruel rejection of a woman with apparent ties to him.

The framework here is that the narrator is telling his story to Vincent, a waiter in a cafe that he frequents and who he seems to believe has special insights. There's an unexpected twist at the end--one that came a bit too abruptly for this reader. I would have liked the author to have fleshed out the story a bit; there's definitely room for some deeper characterization. It's a quick read, good for an evening's entertainment.

Felt Incomplete.

Perfect drama and awesome narration.
But Is there a sequel?
I liked the story but it felt incomplete.

Great snapshot

In under 3 hours, the author distilled so much of Indian socio-cultural contradictions and maladies, in the face of its slowly modernizing world. Well said.