Juvenile comedy

It is necessary at some point for every family with a son to acquire a daughter-in-law. […] She should be fair-complexioned, but if she is dark the dowry should include at least one of the following items: a television set, a refrigerator, a Godrej steel cupboard and maybe even a scooter. […] This girl should have passed all her examinations in the first division but will listen respectfully when her prospective in-laws lecture her on various subjects they themselves failed in secondary school. […] Her mother should urge: ‘Eat something. Eat a laddoo. My daughter made these with her own hands.’ And these laddoos must not be recognizable as coming from the sweetmeat shop down the road.
-- Kiran Desai; Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Kiran Desai’s awareness to the intricacies and eccentricities of Indian people speaking English is remarkable. Her attention to detail in her dialogue (for example, “Arre” and the wonderfully onomatopoeic “Aiii, sir”) makes Hullabaloo worth reading for its Indianised English alone.

But I did not like Desai’s debut novel, and would not recommend it to any serious reader over the age of fourteen. While Desai’s dialogue is amazingly well-crafted, and there are some fine turns of phrase in her descriptions (for example, Sampath’s family “vibrated like giants” when they slept), Hullabaloo is undone by its childish and juvenile plot.

Sampath, a wayward youth, cannot hold a good job and is dissatisfied with his domestic life, so he climbs up a guava tree and stays there for almost one year. Various people attempt to get Sampath down, but to no avail. Suddenly, Sampath starts revealing the people’s innermost secrets, and the mob starts believing that he is a saint. (The truth is more mundane: Sampath used to work at the post office and used to read everyone’s mail.) He delivers The Sermon in the Guava Tree, which includes gems such as “Add lemons to milk and it will grow sour” and “Once my uncle had a rooster and an insect laid its eggs in the flesh of its rear end. It knew the young ones would have a warm place to live and plenty to eat”. Sampath’s father Mr. Chawla makes a healthy profit charging the devotees for seeing and offering blessings to the Monkey Baba. He is so called because of the band of monkeys that hang around in his guava tree.

The monkeys complicate Mr. Chawla’s business by stealing liquor, getting drunk and causing chaos. The Brigadier, the Chief Medical Officer, the Superintendent of Police, and the District Collector, and Mr. Verma each hatch their own plans to contain the crisis of the monkeys, and an apparently hilarious scene occurs when they all fail miserably. At the end of the novel the monkeys disappear into the forest at the edge of the orchard, and Sampath seemingly leaves with them.

Kiran Desai intends laugh-out-loud comedy, but the situation of the Cinema Monkey and his troupe drunk is merely juvenile. She means to portray the Chawla family as slightly unhinged, but her attempts go awry, especially when Kulfi plans to cook a monkey and when Pinky bites the Hungry Hop boy’s ear off. I cannot possibly relate to the actions of any of the characters, and Desai does not succeed in bridging the gap and making the characters less alienated. Furthermore Hullabaloo’s ending is unfulfilling, and it pretends to be deep and thought-provoking when in reality the novel as a whole is not.