The narrator is thrilled by this intimacy, to be welcomed into her secret language. It’s all knotted up - ghachar ghochar, she says, reaching for a word from her childhood, a word invented by her little brother to describe a snarled kite string.
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He has pounced on his new wife, Anita, in their hotel room, but can’t untie the drawstring of her sari’s petticoat. Our narrator (who, with his excellent intentions and total lack of initiative, recalls Nick Carraway) hears it for the first time on his honeymoon.
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The title is a nonsense phrase, meaning tangled beyond repair. Folded into the compressed, densely psychological portrait of this family is a whole universe: a parable of rising India, an indictment of domestic violence, a taxonomy of ants and a sly commentary on translation itself. The Great Indian Novel has almost always referred to a particular kind of book: big, baggy, polyphonic and, crucially, written in English - “Midnight’s Children,” say, or “The God of Small Things.” Admirers of this austere little tale, who include Suketu Mehta and Katherine Boo, have compared Shanbhag to Chekhov. This spiny, scary story of moral decline, crisply plotted and no thicker than my thumb, has been heralded as the finest Indian novel in a decade, notable for a book in bhasha, one of India’s vernacular languages. Money had swept us up and flung us in the midst of a whirlwind.” “When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us.
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“It’s true what they say - it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that controls us,” the nameless narrator realizes, a little late in the day. Sudden wealth only makes them more ruthless. In GHACHAR GHOCHAR (Penguin, $15, paper), a new novella by the Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag, translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur, a family is besieged by both and develops a taste for responding with imaginative cruelty. Troubles - like ants - seldom walk alone.