Usually we blame our problems on lack of wealth. Gachar
Gochar, written by Vivek Shanbhag in Kannada and translated into English by Srinath
Perur argues the opposite: wealth brings problems it its wake. Gachar Gohchar
manages to make its point very succinctly, in only 115 pages through the story
of a Kannada family which goes from lower middle class existence to prosperity
following the success of a spice business the family starts with the corpus
received from the forced voluntary retirement of its sole earning member.
The narrator, a member of the family, takes you through how
the family gradually loses its coherence as wealth comes in. The spontaneous
family gatherings stop, the dependence on each other goes, minor differences
which had found scant attention earlier start developing into prominent
fissures, some of its members scuttle their responsibilities and settle for
easier choices money and power can provide; gradually middle class values,
which had held the family together earlier,
erode. The narrator makes timely interventions stepping back from the
story and giving observations on the happenings to press home the point: that it’s
the new entrant money which is behind the changing complexion of the family.
Despite the seriousness of the topic, Shanbhag manages to make
you laugh for most part of the book with situations that are common to all
middle class joint families. But what impresses you the most is the rootedness
of Gachar Gochar into the world that it belongs to.
Vivek has captured the idiosyncrasies
of a middle class family excellently through their day-to-day habits and
practices, like a discussion started at the dinner table far outlasting the food
and the family members hearing engrossed even as the remnants of the food is
caking up on their fingers or a member absent-mindedly picking up grains of
rice from his plate and putting them in his mouth one by one as he his
listening to what’s being told.
The story is inconclusive, in that the family doesn’t lose the
acquired wealth and return to poverty; but towards the end, a sudden outburst by
the narrator’s wife, Anita, the only daughter of a professor, and ill at ease in
the atmosphere of new money that is her husband’s family, against the patriarch
of the family (Chikkappa) who takes care of the spice business and whose
authority in the family never suffers a dissent - throws the faultlines into
sharp focus: that new money also creates a certain power structure of which
others live and to ensure continuity of their vested interests they avoid
challenging it, however unscrupulous be its way of ensuring that
continuity.
Following the outburst by
Anitha the suffocating silence maintained by the family members on Chikkappa is broken –
and in a throwback to the old times, the family gets together again around
Chikkappa to hear his stories.
The end is like outpouring of rain following a parched day. Gachar
Gochar is another example of the gold mine that is our vernacular literature.
