Laughathonic!
REVIEW
Excuse me while I — giggle, giggle — wipe my — snort! — eyes and — ha, ha, hah, ha haw — sit up once more. Because, even though author Mike Stocks may not have fallen from the sky, he has come ceremoniously unannounced into the pantheon of humour writers who have — hee-hee-whew — taken a slice of (south) Indian provincial life and turned it into a delightful parody.
Not without some unpleasantness, though. For it’s bound to raise the hackles of (in particular) south Indian readers who won’t have to turn too many pages to find reason to flagellate the writer. Even though written with affection, there’s no getting away that Stocks — novelist, poet, translator, lexicographer — has lifted the lid off urban Tamil society, the little and big corruptions in Indian bureaucracy, the rule of the lout, idiotic godhood and the shenanigans of arranged marriages in one delightful little tale.
The setting, for all its small town dirt and filth and unkemptness, is idyllic, and into this make-believe grown-up village so reminiscent of Malgudi, Stocks inserts two protagonists whose stories run simultaneously in a simple, joyous tale that brings tears — of joy, let me hasten to add — to your eyes.
Sub-Inspector R M Swaminathan — Swami to everyone — recently retired on account of intracerebral haemorrhage in the left hemisphere (caused by the custodial beating of a Very Guilty Suspect) is on half-pay disability pension, the father of six unmarried daughters and a very voluble wife. He has also memorised the entire book of The Sacred Couplets, which he quotes by number, since he can no longer talk in complete sentences, and which he uses in lieu of conversation.
Swami’s eldest, Jodhi, is looking for a groom, and on the evening a Maruti van disgorges “a village into the roadside — boys, girls, women, men, ne’er-do-wells, chortling householders, bespectacled intimates, incapacitated crones, complaining extras and a range of hungry freeloaders” at their doorstep, Swami finds a white man who quite literally “falls out of the sky” at his feet. This sets off a stream of events he is unable to control as the potential relationship hits an inauspicious roadblock on the one hand, and embroils Swami in a tug of war with the local police and the votive rich man from whose hotel the white (now dead) man plunged, and to whom all the authorities are beholden.
When the potential groom Mohan (“holder of this year’s illustrious Sri Aandiappan Swamigal Tamil Nadu Information Superhighway Endowment Scholarship” and ardent reader of How to Attract Women) returns with his family for a second pre-engagement meeting, Swami is abducted by goons, but the boy by now is in love with Jodhi. A near-death experience for Swami meanwhile turns, for the townies, into a “walk with God”, and soon a reverential following builds up around the paralysed policeman, his silence now mistaken for saintliness. His former colleagues in the police want to confess their crimes, his tormentor turns into his benefactor, and as Swami becomes Swamiji, Mohan’s love life slides despairingly as word reaches everyone that Jodhi, less than being a dutiful daughter, might be a secret wearer of jeans as she goes around “here and there and everywhere with other boys”.
Swamiji’s further rise to increased sainthood and the shenanigans of the Swaminathan household as they go about trying to ensnare the already ensnared Mohan into matrimony with Jodhi have you in splits. As you guffaw your way through its pages, the comic novel unravels to an end, and not a moment too soon. Any more, and you might need indigestion tablets caused by cramps in your stomach for laughing out loud.
WHITE MAN FALLING
Author: Mike Stocks
Publisher: HarperCollins
PAGES: 303
Price: Rs 250