Lifting the Family Shroud

The unnamed narrator retreats to a coffee house every day to escape from the unsettling atmosphere of crisis at home. In the Coffee House, the serving waiter Vincent seems to the narrator, a wise being who knows secrets of his internal chaos and can put them into a calming virtue of words. The novel opens in one such day, when the narrator finds himself in the coffee house again, only this time he hasn't returned to his home for more than thirty hours, where his wife is expected to return but hasn't. He broods over his failed relationship with a girl at the coffee with whom he had suddenly cut off his ties, but more than that he's there to tell all about his family.

In the following chapters he takes us into the roots of his family, its members and their characters. His family consists of his parents, Chikkappa (Uncle), Malati (Sister) and Anita (Wife). They now own a business, and are well enough, such that the narrator doesn't have to work at all if he wishes to, only that because of his wife he completes the formality of going to work, where he does almost nothing. Chikkappa runs the business, suffers the toil and brings the wealth home to everyone's delight. They weren't always like this; they once had been a family with meager income, and lived in a poor lower-middle-class quarter in an ant¹ infested house, and they'd moved to the present luxury only after new wealth entered their family.

1.    We had two types of ants at home. One was a small brisk-moving black variety that appeared only occasionally. But when it did, it came in an army numbering thousands. These ants wandered everywhere in apparent confusion, always bumping heads and pausing before realizing something and rushing off in random directions. They had no discernible purpose in life other than trying our patience. It didn’t seem like they were here to find food. Nor did they have the patience to bite anyone. Left to themselves, they’d quickly haul in particles of mud and built nests here and there in the house. You could try scuttling them with a broom, but they’d get into a mad frenzy and climb up the broom and on to your arm. Before you knew it, they’d be all over you, even under your clothes. For days on end there would be a terrific invasion, and then one day you’d wake up to find them gone. There was no telling why they came, where they went. I sometimes saw them racing in lines along the window sill in the front room, where there was nothing to eat. Perhaps they were on a mission of some sort, only passing through our house in self-important columns. But not once did I see the tail of a column, an ant that had no other ants behind it.

After the marriage, Anita senses the fault in the family ties and foundation, and therefore there is always a constant tension between the three women of the house. Now, the nouveau riche family is concerned about the comfort of Chikkappa, as he is the sole breadwinner of the family. The narrator himself fears losing his inheritance from his father, and doesn't want to get apart from the riches² and prosperity his uncle has brought in the house, without him doing almost nothing. A dissent to the family virtues and well-being, Anita uses subtle verbal insults, undermines, pokes, challenges their way of life or make fun of whomever she wants and things which she doesn't find agreeable, and as if to rescue the family the narrator's mother and sister too join the verbal row; this is what the narrator escapes from often.

2.     It’s true what they say – it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that controls us. When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us.

The narrator candidly talks about his thoughts, intentions, dark motives and personal failures, as if he accepts it all, but is still at loss. It seems the family has accepted the way things are and doesn't want to change in any way. Meanwhile, Anita resents the family ways and how things are: an uncle who works day and night to maintain the family business; a mother who is limited to the kitchen and can become ruthless if it comes to saving the family values; a father who has less and less say about anything in the family and whose jokes aren't appreciated by anyone; a sister who has left her husband, come to live with her parents and has her own private world, and a husband who is freeloading to the family fortune and virtually does nothing. Ghachar Gochar, a word created by Anita and her brother during their childhood, which means entanglement of things, has become a reality to the narrator, who finds himself in the middle of a war of words ever present in the household between the three women, family values, fear of losing³ the riches and expectation from his wife for him to be independent. It seems that not only their freedom, but their fate and shame too are rooted in the family ties. As if the family has learned to live in harmony amid the dependence, tension and chaos.

3.   A man in our society is supposed to fulfil his wife’s financial needs, true, but who knew he was expected to earn the money through his own toil?

In Ghachar Ghochar, we witness the family and personal secrets being laid bare. We also closely observe the changes in their way of life, of a family as they leap onto the higher social status with a bond and understanding – that is reluctant to change – to such an extent that the whole members are in a sort of symbiosis or have become parasitic. In doing so, their own personal choices have been defined or are limited by those unspoken virtues. The story is a dramatic view of a nouveau riche family, but is not limited to this. It also unveils the dark motives that run in a family. Here, it is a fear of losing the prosperity – which also has deformed the personalities of few. To some extent, we can extrapolate the story to those women who stand against violence and traditional ways, and are under threat from their own families and sinister ways. Ghachar Gochar takes us into the core of a family and its crisis that we often know about but we do not speak of.

Author: Vivek Shanbhag

Translator: Srinath Perur

Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers (India)

Author's Photo Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2136315/vivek-shanbhag

Review Copy Courtesy: Personal Copy