The Iyer you go, the Iyengar you get

No Onions Nor Garlic
Srividya Natarajan

Srividya Natarajan’s debut novel is a very rude book. I am not a paappaan, but spent nearly three decades in the very lap of Paappaandom, as it were, in darkest Tamil Nadu, and I cannot but wince. A paappaan is dialect for a Tamil Brahmin, an Iyer or Iyengar. In Kerala such a one is called a pattar, in south Karnataka a patta. Nowhere does any of these terms connote affection. But oh, good Lord, the things we took for granted!

Natarajan’s book is also side-splittingly funny on at least every other page — which is not a bad average. It owes something perhaps to Wodehouse, something more to Damon Runyon’s Broadway stories, but most of all to the subject. For it is a funny subject, and enduringly so. Natarajan is often cruel, but it is a cruelty that comes with deep understanding — if not of the “this hurts me more than it does you” variety, then of the “I don’t give a damn if this hurts you more than it does me” variety.

Briefly, there is a Professor Pattabhiraman at the English Department of “Chennai University”, and he and his colleagues (named of course Nagarajan, Sambasivan, Subramaniam and Venkataraman) are much exercised by the Reservations Policy that has caused such dilution of standards: ”It was patent to Professor Ram, and to… Drs Iyer, Iyengar, Chaturvedi, Namboodiri, Trivedi, Shastri and Pandit… that a certain reverse troddenness — or ‘trodditude,’ as Dr Chaturvedi preferred to put it — had come into being…. As Iyer et al (1991) have observed, the ‘so-called scheduled castes stomp with an upward motion and grind the upper castes into the stratosphere with an unprecedented gravity-defying aggression, a phenomenon to which we may apply the term “uptroddenness”….’

The Professor and his wife have a son and daughter, both in Canada, and they have advertised in “The Bindhu” — “India’s Principal Newspaper” — for a match which may be “Mutual”, i.e., with a daughter and a son. No onions or garlic, of course. The Professor’s son is Sankaranarayanan (“Chunky”) and his is the cruellest portrait in the book, for it combines a paappaan “oleagineousness” with a truly boring academic mind. The book is about what happens to these ill-assorted matches, and various other improbable characters who get into (as a review of Spike Milligan’s Puckoon once said) “unbelievably likely troubles” in Chennai.

But it’s not much of a plot, and it won’t be much of a review if I go on about it. No Onions is worth it simply for the sideshows. Sample this: “By now, if you lived in Sea View Apartments and wanted to view the sea, you had to turn on your television and get Baywatch, though if you were the type that liked Baywatch, chances are you did not watch the bay very much.”

Oh, this is a delightful novel. The end is weak, and with a little more application, this would have been a much better book. But it’s still a good one. If you tried to immolate yourself at any time in the 90s, don’t read it.