Blandings Castle meets Chennai Univ

WRITER'S BLOCK

Early in my life as a wannabe writer, I learnt the hard way that it's incredibly difficult to pull off a halfway-passable P G Wodehouse imitation.

A terrible "comic" short story still sits somewhere in one of my old school magazines, and there were other failed attempts to approximate the world occupied by characters like Psmith, Uncle Galahad and the rest of the Blandings Castle gang.

Wodehouse is a writer who routinely seduces his fans (especially those between the ages 14-20) into thinking he can be copied "" and, of course, when they try it, they find their face in the mud.

The reason I bring this up is Srividya Natarajan's No Onions Nor Garlic, which manages not only to pay the Master a more-than-decent tribute but also to channel the writing of other greats like Damon Runyon "" and to do all this while remaining faithful to its own setting. This is a manic, immensely entertaining novel.

No Onions Nor Garlic is a comedy/romance set amidst the caste politics of Chennai University. The title derives from a line in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (though it also refers to a "strictly vegetarian-no onions, no garlic" stipulation in a matrimonial advertisement) and the book begins with a bizarre interpretation of the Bard's comedy, conceived and directed by the megalomaniac Professor Ram.

This is a man whose chief aim in life is to restore the Traditional Order of Hinduism, which may help explain why the young changeling who Titania and Oberon quarrel over in the play is eventually revealed to be Lord Krishna (complete with a soliloquy about descending in times of Adharma to protect the righteous).

Prof Ram strongly disapproves of the university's Reservations Policy, which in his view "had swung too far in the pro-low-caste direction... it was snatching the curd rice and mango pickles from the mouths of twice-born Brahmin boys".

A president of the Tamil Brahmin Association (or TamBrahmAss), he subscribes to the theory of reverse troddenness or "trodditude", which states that "the so-called scheduled castes stomp with an upward motion and grind the upper castes into the stratosphere with an unprecedented gravity-defying aggression..."

To counter this undesirable upward motion he appoints a student, the goofy Sundar, as leader of the Brahmin cause and bids him organise a demonstration against a Dr Ambedkar statue that's been installed on the college premises. But Sundar has already fallen in love with a theatre performer named Jiva, a member of the Dalit community.

To compound matters, a quirk of circumstance finds Sundar and his sister engaged to Prof Ram's Canada-returned children.

Thrown into the mix are another professor whose hand keeps moving from his nose to his fly ("spinning a gossamer thread between snout and spout") when he's nervous, a driver whose method for sorting out the brake from the accelerator is to use each at random till he's satisfied with the effect, and an anonymous writer of cheerfully scurrilous missives directed at Prof Ram.

No Onions Nor Garlic might be too loud for some readers' tastes. Natarajan rarely holds back: she plays with words, dismissively uses a funny turn of phrase that another writer might have turned into a centrepiece.

The text is scattered with analogies (when a mother emotionally blackmails her family by reminding them of her sacrifices, she "begins to sigh like the monsoon tearing up the rain forest over the Western Ghats") that would have misfired in a book that took itself very seriously.

However, they suit this madcap caper very well. Good comedy is very hard to get right, and it's refreshing to come across a book that tries to provide belly-laughs on nearly every page and very often succeeds.