You
must have heard the expression, “
Do what you love, and you will never work a day in your life”. An ideal work
life would be to have a job that feeds both our souls and our bank accounts.
Having said that , even a job that you start off loving and enjoying
can be rough if it turns out to be too demanding and stressful to the point that you find that the monetary reward is not commensurate with the level
of stress and responsibilities you have to cope with or for whatever reasons you are no longer happy with what you are doing. Every job comes with its own pitfalls.
Most people have to work to earn a living, some have to hold several jobs to make ends meet. To many people it is not a matter
of choice as we live in a commercial world. Some take it all in their stride while some may feel that they are
trapped by the circumstances they are in. To those who are determined to escape the mundane trappings of the modern world, they will somehow find ways to attain their dreams even when there is not a chance seemingly, be it thrift, steal,
borrow or beg. It takes courage and resolve to live the life we want.
The story of Hullabaloo
in the Guava Orchard written by Kiran Desai is set in the Indian village of Shahkot
( State of Punjab). Sampath Chawla avoids the responsibilities of adult life.
He is a bored peon , a lowly paid post-office clerk who takes pleasure in reading
the postcards that have been brought in for them to be delivered and from these
postcards he picks up all sorts of interesting information. ‘He had read of family feuds and
love affairs, of marriages being arranged, of babies being born, of people dying
and of ghosts retuning, of farewells and home-comings. He had read of natural
disasters, floods and earthquakes , of small trivial matters like the lack of
shampoo. Of big cities and of villages much smaller than Shahkot.
‘ He turned them over, smelled
them, looked at the stamps, studied the names, the strange-feathered words :
Bombalapetty, Pudukkottai,Aurangabad, Torik, Coimbatore, koovappally, Piploo,
Thimpu, Kampala, Cairo, Albuquerque. He held them up against the light, the
envelopes filled with promise, with the possibility of different worlds. He
steamed them open over mugs of tea, just prised them open , the humidity in the
air having rendered the gum almost entirely ineffectual, and lazily, through
the rest of the day, he perused their contents.'
When Sampath loses his job, he does not mind it as he does not want the job. He needs to find a solution to his misery.
‘How would you approach this
problem?
Strangely for some odd reason, from
way off in the distance, he remembered the taunting voice of Father Matthew
Mathematics at the classroom board at the Mission School.
Show all steps leading to the
end result for full marks.
In his
mind, the days, his work, his life and even his thoughts all whirled. The same
days. The same place. The one road –
The post
office at the end of his journey
like a full stop.
He did not
want another job.
He wanted
open spaces.
And
he wanted them in large swathes, in days that were clear stretches he could
fill with as little as he wished. Here a person’s experience of silence and
space squeezed and warped into underground forms that were forced to hide,
found in only a few places that Sampath could discover. In his small lapses from duty; between the eye and the print of a newspaper held by someone who
never turned a page; in a woman who stared into the distance and past the blur
of knitting needles in her fingers; behind muttered prayers, once in a long
while in eyes that could look past everything to discover open spaces. But no,
Sampath was to be allowed no peace whatsoever. He was found out and turned away
from every refuge he sought.'
When Sampath’s
family departs to attend a wedding, leaving him at home, he lets himself out of
the house and catches the first
bus he sees. He has taken the bus
that takes the milk sellers home after they have brought their milk to be sold
in town. When an old woman sits next to him and does not leave him alone by
badgering him with questions, he leaps from the window of the stalling bus and
runs with a feeling of great urgency through an old orchard. He ends up
on top of a large and magnificent
guava tree.
‘When he
settled among the leaves, the very moment he did so- the burgeoning of spirits
that had carried him so far away and so high up fell from him like a gust of
wind that comes out of nowhere, rustles through the trees n melts into nothing
like a ghost. ‘
‘Yes, he was
in the right place at last. Tiredness rolled over him like a wave and, closing
his eyes, he fell into a sleep slumber, lodged in a fork in the guava tree.’
When his family
finds him sleeping on top of the tree, there is a lot of hullabaloo. His quest
for a contemplative life is invariably disrupted and many people come to visit him. When these visitors ask him
for advice, he makes use of the information he has gathered from reading the
letters secretly and he thus appears to be bestowed with second sight. Due to
his simple-minded love of adages, he manages to utter very seemingly wise
sayings that builds him a reputation for unfathomable wisdom. He becomes Monkey
Baba in his treetop hermitage and his father makes use of the situation to make
a lot of money by setting up a tea stall for tourists and churn out posters,
fliers and newspaper articles. When the monkeys come to live in the guava tree
with Sampath, they start to attack people and steal alcohol and become very
drunk. There are many colourful characters including Sampath’s eccentric mother
and sister, the town officials charged with containing the monkeys and there is
also a spy for the local Atheist Society who wants to expose Sampath as a
fraud. It is indeed hullabaloo in the guava orchard.
Kiran Desai
based her book on real life story in which a man, Kapila Pradhan lived on a
tree for 15 years. The story is comical and the author has composed a parable
based on Indian culture and an absolutely delicious satire describing the
follies of humankind, the behaviour of public
servants, entrepreneurialism and
the credulous creation of gurus.
Journey to Infinity MC.Escher's World of Wonder , Artscience Museum, Singapore |
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