Caustic Comedy

~ No Onions Nor Garlic, by Srividya Natarajan ~

This insouciant first novel starts with a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Chennai University. Sundar, Amandeep, Murugesh and Rufus audition for parts, convinced from a brief scan of the script that there will be lots of girls in the play, and that their social lives will magically improve. These dreams are doomed when they discover that the professor in charge has rewritten the play which now includes only two women, and worse, that they themselves will be playing Peaseblossom, Cobweb , Mustardseed, and Moth.

Play day dawns. A depressed artist torches the costumes, but they find a saviour in “Kodambakkam, where Mr. R. Kannan of Navrang Sceneries and Properties Palace rents out false beards by the kilo.” Tights, backdrop, and a Tree of Life are slapped together with Sellotape just in time for the opening. Predictably, chaos ensues.

Behind the curtains, Professor Ram sensed that something had gone wrong among the fairies. His fruity voice wobbled as he set off again.

And I serve the Fairy Queen,
Dew her orbs upon the green…’

Now his voice stopped altogether. Then it floated up into the hall in a tense whisper.

‘Fairies? Fairies? Please get set! Fairies? FAI-RIES!!’

The rabble in the rump area, who never paid much attention to the dialogue, were all along under the impression that Murugesh, Sundar and the other riff-raff were just stage properties of one sort or another, or some low-grade comic turn. Now they were suddenly filled with wild surmise. ‘Fairies?’ they sang out in several different keys. ‘Fairi-fair-fairi-ries! Fa-a-a-a-aries!’ they ululated. ‘Dai, FAIRIES!’

They got up and began to dance in the aisle, making up a song to the tune of Ennuyir Thozhiyay, which was a great hit of the moment. “Ennuyir Fairy-yay!’ they yodelled, flatter than a tire outside a vulcanizing shop.

This rollicking opening led me to expect a sprightly comedy, and much as I like comedy, I had some doubt about the 300 pages to come. Lighthearted entertainment is often best served in smaller doses. But there’s a lot more to this author than her effortless flippancy. The book is actually a biting social satire, much more Tom Wolfe than PG Wodehouse.

Sundar, the reluctant hero, is part of a respectable TamBrahm (Tamil Brahmin, but if you don’t know this, expect lots of other words and phrases to pass you by) family. Other TamBrahms include Professor Ram, who appeared above, his two nubile children, and an assortment of Chennai U. professors.

Professor Ram is in a battle for no less than the soul of Chennai University, or at least his own English department, against the Reservations Policy and the lower caste rabble who are debasing the standards of the place. The rabble is embodied by Professor Laurentia Arul, who dares to be female, insufficiently attractive, and an orphan of unknown background. Unfortunately for Professor Ram, she is also so smart that the committee was unable to avoid hiring her.

It is clear where the author stands on these issues. Her pen pours biting scorn on those who believe in entrenched inherited status. Nor does she hold back on social-science jargon, business empires based on palm-greasing government contacts, or proud mothers of marketable NRIs. The reader can’t miss her stance, but the book is far from being a rant because of her sharp eye for the ridiculous in every situation. This is not a caste war with evil TamBrahms on one side and saintly Dalits on the other. She is tough on the pompous Professor Ram and his kind, but is affectionately amusing about other TamBrahms like Sundar and his family. (The prominent Dalits in the novel, Jiva and Dr. Arul, are less completely drawn.)

Natarajan’s writing comes across as generally effortless. Here’s Caroline, a Canadian ethnographer doing fieldwork with “Day-lights”, as she has learned the lowest castes are called these days.

She belonged strictly to the e.coli school of international travel. The main teaching of this school was that all comestibles served up south of the Tropic of Cancer were about 95 percent life-threatening microbes, with a nutrient or two thrown in as afterthought.

Apart from the main players, there are a lot of minor characters, but this seems entirely appropriate for a novel set in bustling Chennai. As with Caroline, each of these characters is filled out with just enough personality, and as the novel proceeds, the reader discovers how they all fit into the larger plot.

The arranged-marriage meeting, where two sets of parents introduce their children for a potential match, has been used and abused by any number of writers, and you might think you’ve seen it all, but this book has a hilarious and original version.

The book is not perfect: the long descriptive passages are sometimes excessively verbose, and the narrative, while fast, also veers into a few too many side roads. The physical humour is occasionally overdone. But the book and author don’t take themselves too seriously, so it’s hard to take these flaws very seriously either, and even picky readers will be swept along by this rambunctious narrative of love, caste and academia in Chennai.

It is an unfortunate fact that books like this do not get published outside India because they are considered “too Indian” to appeal to the world market, which appears to prefer its ethnic literature to focus on exotic rituals, heat and dust, and abused women. Such a pity. If you live outside India, buy it when you visit, or get your friends and relatives to pick up copies for you.

‘No Onions Nor Garlic’, by Srividya Natarajan. Penguin India, 2006.

This review was first published in 2006, on the SAWNET (South Asian Women’s NETwork) website, which is now defunct. The last paragraph of the review is distinctly out of date. There are more Indian books published abroad, fewer glossaries and awkward transliterations in those books, and even Penguin India books are available abroad via Amazon and other booksellers.