When Faisal Buzdar first mentioned Ghachar Ghochar as a novel not to be missed, a couplet by Sufi Tabassum started reverberating in my mind, without having the faintest idea of the title’s meaning: Ishq namaney diyaan gunjlaan dadhyaan do-walriyaan san/ Kujh paindiyaan paindiyaan khul gaiyaan, kujh khuldiyaan khuldiyaan paiy gaiyaan [The otherwise innocent love had complex double-knots tied all over/ Some would untie when being tied up and some tied up while untying].

Strange as it may sound, it turned out that not only was the phrase invented within a small family mentioned in the novel to denote an impossible entanglement, but the story itself reflects what the second line of Tabassum’s couplet is all about.

Vivek Shanbagh has written eight works of fiction and two plays in Kannada. Ghachar Ghochar is his first book to be translated into English. English readers will have no access to the original, but the flow in this translation suggests that Srinath Perur has done a fairly decent job. Even those terms, items or dishes that are specific to the Kannada language or South Indian culture are woven into the narrative such that no glossary is required. Above all, Perur has done us a big favour by choosing to translate this modern classic.

Shanbagh, in first person, tells the story of a well-knit, lower middle-class family living off low-paid jobs, hitting the jackpot after starting its own business of trading in spices. Although set in Bangalore and entrenched in its locale, this could very well be the story of a similar family and its circumstances in Karachi, Cairo, Istanbul, Sao Paulo or Johannesburg, thus proving once again the inherent connection between locality and universality; something that is not deeply rooted can hardly be universally appreciated.

Ghachar Ghochar tests the binaries we are trained to use in order to make sense of current global trends. The narrator says in the beginning that although he does not believe in the supernatural, he wouldn’t go hunting for a rational basis for everything that happens. The novel meticulously lays out the different kinds of stresses felt by the lower middle-class and the emerging and expanding affluent middle-class in societies experiencing an economic transition: “… it’s not we who control money, it is the money that controls us.” On the one hand is an alienation that opulence brings and on the other is an effort to ward off anything that may weaken the familial bond.

There are traditional women guarding their patriarch tooth and nail and there are fiercely independent women fuelled by contemporary liberal ideas of civic action and feminism. Some themes — and the commentary around them — seem predictable at times, but how these feelings are conveyed turns ordinary lines into axioms. For instance, while recalling a fight between his wife, sister and mother, the narrator says: “… the sword of insult seldom cuts on the surface. No, it lacerates from within and leaves wounds that reopen with remembrance.” Elsewhere he describes how the practice of giving gifts to people living in the same house was new to them because in the past all purchases were discussed among the whole family to fit the available budget. But then he says: “Even if we could have afforded it, there’s something absurd about exchanging gifts when it’s all paid for from a single pocket.”

The famous opening lines of the classic Russian novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy read: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” These lines came to my mind when the narrator in Ghachar Ghochar says: “The well-being of any household rests on selective acts of blindness and deafness.” Therefore, there are no families that are innately happy. Some continuous effort is needed.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad. His collection of essays Crimson Papers: Reflections on Struggle, Suffering, and Creativity in Pakistan was recently published by Oxford University Press

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 9th, 2017