Published 2.7.2017. New York: Penguin Books. Translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur. 128 pages.

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Vivek Shanbhag’s novella (or is it a novel? who cares!) Ghachar Ghochar begins in a peaceable setting, a coffee house-turned-cafe called Coffee House. It is an appropriate place to start the book given its subsequent themes: A coffee house is a business founded on the idea that you spend two or three dollars (or don’t, but who does that?) and then you can idle in a place where no one bothers you. If it is a classy place, one that aspires to a certain ambience, there might be an especially charismatic waiter, whose zen-like wisdom and the warm light seem to hold trouble at bay—which is not to say you don’t have troubles, only that while you relax in the place of peace they seem to be held in suspension.

Of course that peace can be deceptive, narcotizing. A person or even a society can ease into misfortune even while the years go by in the lap of comfort (there’s even a sub- sub-genre of science fiction describing this type of story—a “cozy catastrophe.”) The book shows the unfolding of such a tragedy on the level of one Indian family, which may be seen as illustrative of the experience of many “joint” families in India who cohabit under one roof, but are now being driven apart by the realities of a more consumerist daily existence.

The narrator describes the central issue early on:

It is natural to wonder, I suppose, why the six of us should want to live together. What can I say—it is one of the strengths of families to pretend that they desire what is unavoidable.

The word pretend is key. A family in Shanbhag’s conception is like one long version of the Abilene paradox; everyone goes along with the pretense while it seems to make sense, while conditions allow it to remain together. Remove those conditions and the tacit understandings that allow close family relationships begin to fray. The signal virtues of Ghachar Ghochar are how Shanbhag brings this out so agreeably, with sharp characterization of each family member and humorous episodes by which we get to know them.

The book was originally written in Kannada, a language of southwest India spoken by about 40 million people, with the biggest concentration being from Karnataka, where the author is from. Shanbhag has been writing since the age of 15, as he describes in an interview with LiveMint.com’s Elizabeth Kuruvilla, but left his hometown at age 17 to work for a range of companies across India. The germ of Ghachar Ghochar, according to the author, was when he was sent for sales training for his company and stayed at the house of a salesman, and Shanbhag observed “how close-knit that family was, so involved in what he was doing.” From such slight glimpses, as Henry James explained, an artist can spin the thread of entire lives and this Shanbag does. (Finely too, without wasting any.)

The narrator’s family is in the spice trade, which is why it’s curious that he spends his days at the cafe. But everyone in the family has a role, he assures us. The narrator’s father, Appa, was for many years the family’s only source of income. He was a tea salesman, and so good at it that he could sell even to shops that didn’t need his tea; he would be immaculately dressed, and so carefully managed the financea of the house that if his inventories and sales numbers did not match up perfectly, he would keep the whole house awake crunching and re-crunching the numbers until the mistake was found. In recompense for his diligence, Appa was dropped by the tea distributor as part of a mass layoff and restructuring of the company. This is the first entry of modern capitalism and its depredations into the family’s previously stable life.

After this, it becomes the turn of Chikappa, the narrator’s uncle, to persuade the family to turn entrepreneurial and start the spice selling business, which is where our story starts; the story is not told in a linear order but circles back on itself repeatedly. At the beginning, it is not clear why the family is divided or the main character is sitting despondent in a cafe. We are told that everything possible must be done to keep Chikappa satisfied, since he is now the family’s sole breadwinner, and the main person who takes on this ask is Amma, the narrator’s mother. She it was who years ago, when the family lived in poorer conditions, waged an all-out war against the ants that continually infested their home. Today, she is just as dogged in turning away one of Chikappa’s secret amours, calling the woman a “whore” and throwing the box of spices she came with to the ground. Yes, something has changed; Amma’s ruthlessness is resisted by just one person in the household, Anita, the narrator’s wife and the newest member of the family. She has not been with them these many years as their ethos changed.

Melati, the narrator’s sister, illustrates the change in the family most drastically. Before the spice business became successful, everyone in the family pooled their resources, and nothing was bought without the agreement of the entire group. Every item of food was accounted for, eating at a restaurant was an event, and domestic items were to be purchased only on an as-needed basis. But once the family was flush with cash, they moved from a practice of we-all-need-to-agree to an honor system, which Melati, greedy for clothes, furniture, and all of life’s finer things, promptly abuses to purchase any number of unnecessary things. When it is time for her to get married, she has the most lavish wedding possible, and this love of luxury ultimately becomes the undoing of her marriage. A hint of largesse makes Melati go mad; as the narrator puts it:

Perhaps it is not right to conflate Malati’s short-lived marriage with the wedding expenses or our family’s wealth. But I can’t help wondering if she would have given up as easily if Appa had still been a salesman.

What’s more, the family as a whole had become more rough in its dealings; Chikappa contacts an associate of his, Ravi, who has a gang of men go with Malati to reclaim her things from her adopted family. It later becomes clear that Chikappa’s relationship with these thugs is something more than just a one-time affair; employing a gang of thugs has somehow become essential to how Chikappa does business, though this element of the family’s corruption is left vague. The arc of the novel shows that a large corporation (the tea distributor) screwed over Appa and his family, and that they responded by going into business for themselves and becoming very much like those who screwed them; this, in microcosm, is the morally coarsening effect of unbridled capitalism: I don’t trust you, you don’t trust me.

The introduction of Anita, the narrator’s fiancee and then spouse, seems to cause a rift in the family, though arguably Anita only exposes problems that were already there. The narrator, to answer the question of why he spends all day at the cafe, does so because he is incapable of work, or at the very least, he lacks the drive that other members of the family have. They have tacitly agreed to allow him to live a life of indolence, but when Anita discovers that her new husband is basically India’s version of a slacker, this does not at all comport with her modern, capitalist values, which equate virtue with work. Nor does Anita cotton to how rigidly hierarchical the family is; she bristles when Amma so brutally sends Chikappa’s mistress away, and the whiff of criminality given off by Chikappa’s employment of thugs drives her further away. As the end of the novel makes clear, what may seem like a situation of perfect stability to one person may seem downright intolerable to another. The story ends despondently, with our beginning to understand the narrator’s emotional state at the beginning of the novel. This emotional state ties into the idea behind the book’s title, ghachar ghochar, a pair of nonsense words that Anita learned in childhood, meaning entangled, messed up.

I found Ghachar Ghochar an interesting book written in a genial style, illustrating significant issues, and generally not wasting the reader’s time. It is hard to find fault with a book like that, which may be why some other reviewers have flown into raptures, calling the book a “masterpiece,” the best Indian novel of the decade, and so forth; I’m not sure I was affected powerfully enough to agree with those assessments. I felt sad for the narrator, though the sadness was mild and otherwise my gut told me, “That was a good story, well-told. I’d read more of this author.” In short, I was neither hot nor lukewarm on Ghachar Ghochar; just warm really, which for some people is preferable.