Set in an Indian backwater named Shahkot, Hullabaloo in
the Guava Orchard traces the chaotic progress of the monumentally
unmotivated Sampath Chawla from failed post office clerk to guava-tree-inhabiting
guru. this is a novel very much in the tale-telling mould. Desai
unravels the narrative in a series of gossipy asides and sub plots,
almost imperceptibly mimicking the diction of her characters.
The writing shifts between passages of subtly observed dialogue
and evocative lists compiled from the names of exotic fruits and
birds, sari silks and the ingredients of lavish imaginary meals.
The result is a thoroughly charming, funny and occasionally touching
insight into the absurdities and ambiguities of life in small-town
India.
The impossibly absent-minded Sampath is sacked from his dismal
post-office job after committing an unspeakable outrage at the
wedding feast of his employer’s daughter. Horrified at his father’s
suggestion that he apply for a post at the Utterly Butterly Delicious
Butter Factory, he heads for the hills and takes up residence
in a guava orchard on the outskirts of town, followed by his affectionate
but infuriated family. In this new context, however, Sampath’s
chronic daydreaming is reinterpreted as a life of spiritual contemplation
and he swiftly develops a local reputation as a holy man. For
a while it seems that Sampath’s escape has been a solution to
everyone’s problems as he settles happily into the life of a guru
and his family embark upon a lucrative business catering for the
coachloads of pilgrims and sightseers arriving to visit the ‘tree-baba’.
This pastoral idyll is shattered by the arrival of a riotous tribe
of alcoholic monkeys who move into Sampath’s tree, leaving only
to make smash and grab raids on local liquor stores and to harass
the young women of Shahkot. Depicting the ensuing descent into
anarchy Desai is in her element, cataloguing the various insane
schemes proposed by the town’s leading citizens to solve the monkey
problem. The comedy is tempered with a genuine pathos as Sampath
helplessly watches the destruction of his paradise by his community’s
endlessly baulked desire to impose order on a chaos of their own
making. As events spiral ever further out of control however,
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard begins increasingly
to read like one of Sampath’s more obscure mystical utterances:
‘First a chikoo is raw,’ said Sampath. ‘Then if you do not pick
and eat it quickly it will soon rot and turn to alcohol’. What
was he saying? That the time of perfection passes, that you should
eat a chikoo at the right time only, that everything is part of
nature, that good becomes bad or that bad is not really bad because
it is all part of the nature of a chikoo? Oh sometimes he was
hard to understand.
Desai’s subtle exploration of the ambiguous nature of Sampath’s
holiness is one of the novel’s major strengths. However the expanding
layers of ambiguity run the risk of finally becoming as frustrating
to the reader as they do to the inhabitants of Shahkot. The final
descent into absurdity (metamorphosis of man into fruit!) and
abrupt conclusion in the midst of chaos is disappointingly weak.
The novel’s peculiar brand of mysticism works well up to this
point precisely because it works within a recognisable, if somewhat
bizarre framework of reality. The final collapse of this framework
undermines the fragile relationship which Desai has created between
a real and an imagined landscape and in so doing undermines her
greatest achievement. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
is an utterly charming first novel which possesses what must be
one of the silliest denouements in literature.
Reviewed by Holly Yates
