Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard Read online

  Praise for Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard:

  A New York Times Editor’s Choice

  A San Francisco Chronicle Editor’s Recommendation

  “Desai is a lavish, sharp-eyed fabulist whose send-up of small-town culture cuts to the heart of human perversity.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Delectable … with this sprightly first novel, Kiran Desai takes her place among the pack of gifted young Indian writers.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Giddily irreverent … In crackling, witty, sharply visual prose, Desai mocks pious enthusiasm, official incompetence, domestic confusion, young love, marriage customs, sacred monkeys, and a few subsidiary targets. She is a delightfully funny, amiable satirist.”

  —Atlantic Monthly

  “A voice and a huge imagination leap from the pages of [this] dizzying Hindi film of a novel.”

  —Zia Jaffrey, The New York Times

  “Clearly envisioned and opulently told … Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is as memorable as its title. With it, Desai joins the ranks of Anglo-Indian writers who have energized English literature with their imaginative, complex storytelling.”

  —Tammie Bob, Chicago Tribune

  “Streamlined and imaginative prose … a clever, haunting parable … remarkably complex characters, unpredictable plot twists, and vivid descriptions … a spectacularly fresh vision.”

  —Reena Jana, San Francisco Chronicle

  “A charming, lyrical fable about destiny and the nature of kinship.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “Brilliantly funny and beautifully written … Desai neatly skewers the posturing of a caste-ridden society … but with enormous charm, even love. … a truly delightful read.”

  —Meir Ronnen, The Jerusalem Post

  “Wryly hilarious—a roller-coaster ride through the nonsense of chance and human foolishness.”

  —The Oregonian

  “So fresh and funny and delicious is [Desai’s] book that it defies comparison. … Wonderfully accessible to non-Indians … the writing is, throughout, almost effortless and is exquisitely observant. … A welcome, delightful must.”

  —Andrew Robinson, The Times (London)

  “A wild, sad, humorous story … Desai’s novel is full of wonderfully portrayed characters and beautifully vivid descriptions … An unqualified pleasure to read.”

  —Library Journal

  “More than just a hullabaloo … What seems merely to be the lead-in to a good laugh and nothing more actually lingers, leaving questions that are, for all their familiarity, no less profound.”

  —Lise Funderberg, Newsday

  “There is so much to admire in this charming book, dainty in its construction but ballasted by real emotion, that to call Desai a young writer of promise would do her a disservice. On this showing she is already a finished article.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

  “An exuberant romp full of whimsy, humor, and affectionate satire. [Desai’s] artful magic realism coupled with her lyrical prose makes for unusually bracing reading. … With her lush prose and extraordinary gift for playfulness, Desai is a refreshing voice.”

  —Alicia Metcalf Miller, The Plain Dealer

  “Desai … is a dazzling literati … [Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchara] brings to mind the books of Gabriel García Márquez, including Love in the Time of Cholera.”

  —The India Monitor

  “This is a beguiling novel, fresh and funny and warmhearted.”

  —Roxana Robinson, author of Cost and Sweetwater

  “A hullabaloo of a debut from a vibrant, creative imagination.”

  —Gita Mehta, author of A River Sutra

  “A delicious blend of humor and magic, hilarity and wisdom—and unexpected poetry. Kiran Desai’s language will continue to delight you long after you turn the last page.”

  —Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of Arranged Marriage and The Mistress of Spices

  “Desai’s first novel is a feast for the senses. Atually, it is a buffet, an all-you-can-eat affair that bombards the reader from start to finish with a glowingly layered tapestry of noise, visual images, and tactile impressions one can feel and smell just by turning the pages of this farcical romp.”

  —Danna Greenfield, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

  “Kiran Desai has two remarkable gifts—comedy and fantasy. Add to this a flair for storytelling and you have the uproarious, whimsical, and occasionally stinging Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.”

  —Bhaswati Chakravorty, The Telegraph Calcutta

  “Resonates with old-world charm and new-world noises … [Desai] spins a hilarious tale with a smattering of Rushdiesque flourish. … [A] novel throbbing with the innocence of life and the complexities of living.”

  —India Today

  “Events threaten, delightfully, to spin out of control, like a Peter Sellers movie in which everyone is sedate and nicely dressed, but before you know it the baby elephant is in the swimming pool and people are cavorting in giant soapsuds. Desai’s mayhem … is detailed in delightful specificity.”

  —Emily Hall, The Seattle Weekly

  “Beautifully crafted … Desai clearly has a gift for writing farce, and there is plenty to laugh at here.”

  — The Daily Telegraph (UK)

  “Dazzling style … [Desai] demonstrates wonderful satirical insight into human vanities and foibles that transcend culture. And she writes a mean sentence. You don’t just read her words, you hear them.”

  —Sandra Scofield, The Oregonian

  “Beautiful … a masterful blending of the unexpected … Told in gorgeous, sensual prose, steeped in humor and wisdom.”

  —Didi Enslow, Chicago Life

  HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD

  Also by Kiran Desai

  The Inheritance of Loss

  Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

  KIRAN DESAI

  Copyright © 1998 by Kiran Desai

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  The sayings on page 175 are taken from Bhargava’s Standard Illustrated Dictionary of the Hindi Language, compiled by R. C. Pathak, BA, LT 5th ed., Bhargava Book Depot, Chowk, Varanasi, 1989

  First Published in Great Britain in 1998 by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Desai, Kiran, 1971–

  Hullabaloo in the guava orchard / Kiran Desai.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4450-8

  I. Title.

  PS3554.E82H85 1998

  813′.54—dc211 97-51148

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For my family

  with love

  1

  That summer the heat had enveloped the whole of Shahkot in a murky yellow haze. The clutter of rooftops and washing lines that usually stretched all the way to the foothills at the horizon grew blurred and merged with t
he dust-filled sky.

  ‘Problems have been located in the cumulus that have become overly heated,’ read Mr Chawla from the newspaper. ‘It is all a result of volcanic ash thrown up in the latest spurt of activity in Tierra del Fuego.’

  And a little later he reported to whomever might be listening: ‘The problem lies in the currents off the West African coastline and the unexplained molecular movement observed in the polar ice-caps.’

  And: ‘Iraq attempts to steal monsoon by deliberately creating low pressure over desert provinces and deflecting winds from India.’

  And even: ‘Hungarian musician offers to draw rain clouds from Europe to India via the music of his flute.’

  ‘Why can’t they think of serious solutions?’ asked Mr Chawla. ‘It is too hot to fool about with Hungarian musicians.’

  Shahkot boasted some of the highest temperatures in the country and here there were dozens of monsooninducing proposals. Mr Chawla himself submitted a proposal to the forestry department for the cutting and growing of vegetation in elaborate patterns; the army proposed the scattering and driving of clouds by jet planes flying in a special geometric formation; the police a frog wedding to be performed by temple priests. Vermaji of the university invented a giant fan which he hoped would attract the southern monsoon clouds by creating a wind tunnel moving north towards the Himalayas, and he petitioned the Electricity Supply Board for enough power to test it. Amateur scientists from Mr Barnala of Tailor Gully to Miss Raina from the Sainik Farms area attended trade fairs where they displayed instruments that emitted magnetic rays and loud buzzing sounds. Everyone in town was worried. The mercury in the police station thermometer had exceeded the gradations Kapoor & Sons Happy Weather Company had seen fit to establish, leaping beyond memory and imagination, and outdoing the predictions of even Mr Chawla’s mother, Ammaji, who liked to think she knew exactly what the future would bring.

  It was a summer that sent the dizzy pulse of fever into the sky, in which even rules and laws that usually stood straight and purposeful grew limp, like plants exposed to the afternoon sun, and weak. The heat softened and spread the roads into sticky pools of pitch and melted the grease in the Brigadier’s moustache so that it drooped and uncurled, casting shadows on his fine, crisp presence. It burned the Malhotras’ daughter far too dark for a decent marriage and caused the water, if it came at all, to spurt, scalding, from the taps. The bees flew drunk on nectar that had turned alcoholic; the policemen slept all day in the banana grove; the local judge bribed an immigration official and left to join his brother in Copenhagen. Foreigners in their tour buses turned and went home, while Shahkotians argued for spots directly below their ceiling fans, leaving only for minutes if absolutely necessary and then hurrying back. In the marketplace, they raided the shops for palm leaf fans and bought grey blocks of ice that smoked like small fires. They rested their heads against the coolness of melons before cutting into them, held glasses against cheeks and foreheads between sips, fanned themselves at the stove with bunches of spinach before letting go reluctantly, for the sake of the evening meal.

  The weeks passed, but the monsoon did not arrive. And by the time it was September, they had given up hope.

  It was this year that Sampath Chawla was born to his mother, Kulfi. She was twenty-one years old, newly married to Mr Chawla, and pregnant. By late September the heat and lack of rain had combined to produce terrible conditions of drought. She grew bigger as it got worse. It got to be so bad that famine-relief camps were set up by the Red Cross to the west of Shahkot. The supply planes flew right over the bazaar and Shahkotians, watching with their heads tilted back, wondered why they didn’t stop for them as well, for surely they were suffering quite enough to warrant the same attention and care being so assiduously delivered elsewhere. The ration shop was distributing rice and lentils in smaller and smaller portions all the time. There was no fruit to be found anywhere and hardly any vegetables. Prices had risen so high, nobody would buy the scraggy chickens sitting in cages outside the meat shop. Finally the poor butcher had to eat them himself, and after the last one, he was forced to turn vegetarian like the rest of the town.

  Kulfi, in these months, was so enormously large, she seemed to be claiming all the earth’s energy for herself, sapping it dry, leaving it withered, shrivelled and yellow. People stopped short in amazement as she walked down the street. How big she was! They forgot their dealings in the almost empty marketplace. They teetered on their bicycles as they looked around for just another sight of that stomach extending improbably before her like a huge growth upon a slender tree. Her eyes were so dark, so sooty and vehement, though, these people who turned their heads to stare turned quickly away again, ill at ease for some reason and unsettled. Not noticing them, she passed by as if they weren’t there at all. On her face, about her mouth and in the set of her chin was an expression intent and determined but yet far away and distant, as if all her thoughts were concentrated upon a point invisible to everybody but herself. She walked through Shahkot like this, as distracted as this, as strange as this.

  ‘What do you expect?’ asked Ammaji, her mother-in-law, making excuses when curious neighbours asked about Kulfi’s state of mind. ‘What do you expect from a woman with a baby in her belly like a little fish?’

  But Kulfi was not thinking of the baby in her belly like a little fish. She was thinking of fish themselves. Of fish in many forms. Of fish big enough and good enough to feed the hunger that had overtaken her in the past months like a wave. She thought of fish curries and fish kebabs. Of pomfret, bekti, ruhi. Of shoals of whiskered shrimp. Of chewy mussels. She thought of food abundant in all its many incarnations. Of fenugreek and camel milk, yam and corn. Mangoes and coconuts and custard apples. Mushrooms sprouting like umbrellas in the monsoon season. Nuts, wrinkled in their shells, brown-skinned, milky-fleshed.

  The house was small for her big desire. She walked from the tiny blue bedroom to the kitchen thick with the smell of kerosene, around the table and chairs, up and down the balcony, down the stairs past the rooms of neighbours who shook their heads over her, then around the jamun tree in the middle of the courtyard.

  ‘Oh dear, what is going to become of this woman?’ said Lakshmiji, the Raipurs, the Bengali teacher, and all of the others when they looked out of their windows, when they gossiped at the tea stall or sat in each other’s houses eating peanuts together. ‘There was always something odd about her,’ they said. ‘You could tell this from the minute she entered Shahkot.’

  Meal after meal of just rice and lentils could not begin to satisfy the hunger that grew inside Kulfi; she bribed the vegetable sellers and the fruit sellers and the butcher with squares of silk, with embroidery, a satin petticoat, an earring set in gold, a silver nutcracker, bits of her dowry that had not yet been pawned. She bribed them until they had nothing left to give her anyway. By then, her hunger was so fierce, it was like a big, prowling animal. In her mind, aubergines grew large and purple and crisp, and then, in a pan, turned tender and melting. Ladyfingers were flavoured with tamarind and coriander. Chicken was stewed with cloves and cardamom. She thought of chopping and bubbling, of frying, slicing, stirring, grating.

  ‘What on earth is she doing?’ shouted Mr Chawla as he watched his wife disappear down the road to the marketplace again and again, as he surveyed the emptying cupboards in the house, the missing items, the gaps on the shelves. ‘What have you married me to, Amma?’ he demanded ferociously of his mother, who looked worried as well. However, since she was responsible for the marriage, she put her worry as far from herself as possible, clucked her tongue and said soothingly: ‘She is at a very delicate stage. Wait a little and maybe she will come out of it.’

  ‘Come out of it.’ He snorted. ‘She is not going to come out of it. And if the baby takes after her, we are really in for trouble.’

  Oddness, like aches and pains, fits of tears and lethargy, always made him uneasy and he had a fear of these uncontrollable, messy puddles of life, the sticky humann
ess of things. He intended to keep his own involvement with such matters to the minimum, making instead firm progress in the direction of cleanliness and order. He went to the public library to look for books about babies and waited in line outside the Mission School to enrol the baby well in advance, for he knew how long the waiting lists were. He collected vitamins and tonics from the government clinic.

  ‘You must take care to boil your drinking water for twenty minutes.’ He followed Kulfi about the house reading aloud from his library book as she ignored him. He held one of his fingers up in the air. Despite his young age and slight build, he felt a powerful claim to authority. ‘You must sit down and rest after any exercise,’ he advised. And: ‘You must stand up and exercise regularly and diligently’And: ‘Don’t eat raw fruit any more.’ And: ‘Don’t sing songs and tire yourself out. Don’t drink tea on an empty stomach. Keep yourself extra clean. Wash your hair, take a nap, put your legs up in the air and do bicycling exercises.’ He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief and continued following his wife, even though it was clear she had no interest whatsoever in what he was saying.

  Ammaji had her own ideas of how a woman’s pregnancy should be managed. She fussed with pillows and herbs, with hairbrushes and bottles of strong-scented oil for massages. ‘Sing songs to improve the baby’s mood,’ she advised. ‘Go to the temple. Say the right prayers. Make sure the baby is healthy. Make sure the planetary configurations are good. Make sure you have no lice. Make sure you smell nice, and the baby will smell nice too.’

  Everywhere there was the feeling of breath being drawn in and held, as if it wouldn’t be let free again until the baby was born and it could be released – released happy and full of relief if the baby was a boy; released full of disappointment and resentment if it wasn’t.

  In Kulfi’s stomach Sampath was at first quiet, as if he weren’t there at all. Then, as if excited, he grew bolder and more full of life, until he kicked and turned and even leapt. Kulfi paced up and down, up and down, with her hands upon her belly and thought she might soon begin to scream, and that, whether she wanted to or not, she might continue to scream all the way up until the birth and maybe even after. Her stomach grew larger, her dreams of eating more extravagant. The house seemed to shrink. All about her the summer stretched white-hot into an infinite distance. Finally, in desperation for another landscape, she found a box of old crayons in the back of a cupboard and, with a feeling bordering on hysteria, she began to draw on the dirty, stained walls of the house. She drew around the pictures of babies Ammaji had put up. Babies eating porridge, posing with dolls and fluffy yellow chicks, attempting somersaults. Babies fat and fair and male that Ammaji hoped would somehow, through some mysterious osmotic process, influence the formation of her grandchild. Kulfi drew around these pictures and sometimes over them. She drew a pond, dark but leaping with colourful fish. A field of bright pineapples and pale, dangling snake-gourd. Big lumbering jackfruit in a jackfruit tree and a scratching bunch of chickens. As her husband and mother-in-law retreated in horror, not daring to upset her or the baby still inside her, she drew a parade of cooks beheading goats. Others running to a marketplace overflowing with things to bargain over. Some standing over steaming pots with ladles or pounding whole spices on a grinding stone. She drew creepers and vines that climbed in at the window and spilled a wilderness of leaves upon the walls. She began to draw fruit she did not know; spices yet to be discovered in hidden pods or sequestered in the heart of unknown flowers. She drew dishes that she had never eaten: a black buck suspended over a fire with a row of ingredients destined to transform it into magnificence; a peacock cavorting among cloves of garlic; a boar entangled in a jungle of papaya trees. Onions grew large beneath her feet; creepers burst from the floorboards; fish swam beneath the doors.