Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
Searching for a Profit
The more trying the times get – and it seems like those contributing to this are finding even more ways to top themselves – the search for something to help us make sense of everything or at least ballast ourselves, widens. Of course, this opens the door for a lot of insidiousness.
*Quick trigger warning: the next three paragraphs talk about body image topics so do take care when reading or feel free to skip over them.
My latest find is the glut of stomach-churning pieces proclaiming the end of the body positivity movement and the return of “heroin chic.” Feel free to disagree, but I doubt there has ever been a time without opinions on what women should do with their bodies. It has a veritable chokehold on the sociocultural landscape and is very much reflective of shifting political climates. There is a direct link to a rise in hateful, repressive rhetoric and the expectation that women must respond by aspiring to bodies that are smaller, weaker, and ornamental.
Not for a second do I believe that it only leads back to the argument that it’s actually because, when things feel out of control, “we” – as though it applies to everyone equally – try to control our bodies. Kiran Desai’s novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was published in 1998 and in the late nineties, India was experiencing huge economic growth and reforms. For many, this led to a life of being crushed under the wheels of modernity. Nearly thirty years later, there are similarities that are hard to deny. If anything it feels like we’re drowning more than ever in false prophets.
Not that I have any answers of course. (If you’re wondering how I manage to stay so zingy all the time, my way of getting a grasp on the world is baking cakes and forcing people to eat them or rewatching episodes of Come Dine With Me – look, we all need our trash tv moments.) I picked up up Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard at the beginning of this year – I’ll let you work out which events prompted me to reach for this book about a guy who garners a lot of adoring followers that sincerely believe he has the answers to everything – because as we know, books are a way of contextualizing the world. I’m not sure when the current use of “unhinged” became so widespread, but that’s a good way to describe this book. Everyone here is a bit unhinged and it’s fantastic. A reverse Alice in Wonderland where the protagonist is hellbent on escaping the madness of a world that stifles him – until he and his family learn how to manipulate it to their advantage.
The story follows the Chawla family from the town of Shahkot, a backwater that even the monsoons visit last. But the day Kulfi Chawla gives birth to her son, not only do the monsoons arrive but a Red Cross relief crate is dropped into their courtyard, smashing into their old jamun tree. They name their son Sampath (‘good fortune’) “for though he might not be very plump or very fair, he was triumphantly and indisputably male.” Twenty years later however, the son of fortune lavishes in failure. As a back office postal worker, his only joy is reading the private correspondences of Shahkot’s residents. Unfortunately this pleasure is lost to him after his drunken striptease in a fountain at the wedding of his boss’ daughter. The next day Sampath’s new career is unknowingly about to begin when he takes a bus to an abandoned guava orchard to escape his family’s browbeating. Climbing into the branches of an enormous guava tree Sampath experiences perhaps the first moments of peace he’s had in his life.
At first his family are horrified by what people will say. That is until Sampath starts sharing their private information which he gleaned from his snooping at the post office. The wagging tongues are immediately convinced that Sampath is some sort of holy being and Mr. Chawla immediately leads the charge in profiting off of his son’s newfound influence. It’s so hard to not share the whole story, so I’ll just tell you that there’s a group of monkeys who start hanging out in Sampath’s tree before they get hooked on alcohol and begin terrorizing Shahkot in search of their next fix, and leave it at that.
Nobody here is particularly “normal,” but for me, the most interesting character is Kulfi (just like the Indian ice cream). Only she understands Sampath’s desire to escape as she herself spends most of her waking hours in a gastronomic la-la land, thinking about the different ingredients she’d like to cook. They range from reasonable (pomegranates) to questionable (peacocks – although these birds do precede the turkey as the original banquet bird in the west), to outright dangerous (picking random plants that might be poisonous).
While Sampath’s days are spent communing with his followers, Kulfi is crashing through the university research forests, and filling her dupatta with ingredients to feed her fake prophet son. She doesn’t share her concoctions with any of Sampath’s devotees despite the fact that it is their worship which keeps the enterprise alive. The dreaminess over what the land has to offer quickly narrows into taking everything that can be consumed until all of her energies are focused on trying to catch and cook a monkey.
For a while I sympathized with Sampath. Peace and proximity to nature as opposed to the eternal search for a career ladder to climb, are fast becoming luxuries. Reading this book in 2025, all of this feels accelerated with the top 1% in possession of more wealth than 95% of humanity. Meanwhile the internet is exploding with people screaming at you for being a loser because you don’t work out/dress/travel/consume proteinified everything/get rich quick like they do.
Allow me to bare my soul for a moment and say that my express version of a guava tree in the middle of the workday is to set a timer and sit on the floor against the bathtub with my knees up. There’s a potted tree opposite the tub and looking into its green depths is calming. The only difference is that instead of garnering followers, my cats fix me with their serious, soulful expressions. Sure, there’s sympathy, but there is also a reminder that I need to maintain the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.
The problem with Sampath is that he gets a little too comfortable with the sounds of his own nuggets of wisdom. When his followers ask him questions about life, his responses are as vague and slightly confusing as magazine horoscopes. Still, however misguided or gullible we might consider his followers, they too are looking for peace and answers. Instead of throwing themselves into the cogs of the newly reformed machine, they spend their days gathered around his guava tree. The question I keep coming back to is, are we meant to think that the Chawlas’ behaviour is reprehensible or are they just playing by the rules of this new, modern world?
I loved Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard in part for how thoroughly bizarre yet relatable it is. Shahkot and its residents are all a little mad as the saying goes, but as individuals, the Chawlas are particularly proof that the world can’t be divided strictly into leaders and followers. If that were true, it would mean that an uncomfortable number of us would be like those alcoholic monkeys, terrorizing anyone who stands in the way of or possesses what we want.