And the table on which the cooking gas stove was rested in the old house is rendered useless because the new kitchen “had a counter on both sides.” No sitting on the floors to eat anymore-the family now has a dining table with six chairs. A bench, two chairs and mattresses give way to beds and dressers. This means a move to a richer neighborhood, from a tiny railroad-style house with no living room to a big, two-storied place. In Ghachar Ghochar, a lower-middle-class family finds itself suddenly wealthy. Film stars Balraj Sahni, Achala Sachdev, Sunil Dutt, Sadhana, Rajkumar, Sharmila Tagore, Shashi Kapoor, Sumati Gupte, Surendra, and Manmohan Krishna in film Waqt.(Express archive photo) Under such circumstances, one would expect a novella that’s a translation to die a sure death, but Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar, translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur, has been quietly flourishing for some time now. A translation-that lowly form that Indian publishers have long struggled to place and sell, especially when it’s from an Indian language-is another non-favourite. The novella-that strange beast that’s not quite short story, not quite novel, not quite read-is no publisher’s favorite form.
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