♦ OVERVIEW ♦

The story begins with the birth of Sampath Chawla, the unassuming and accidental protagonist of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. It is at the tail-end of a punishing drought in the city of Shahkot, India, and at the same time as Sampath is born, a giant airplane-ration of food and supplies crashes into a tree outside the Chawla's house, signaling prosperity to an otherwise starving town. Fast-forward about twenty years, and the novel picks up again with Sampath miserably performing his menial job as a mail

sorter at the local post office. Events draw to a culmination and frustration mounts when Sampath loses his postal job after performing an impromptu cross-dressing striptease at his boss's daughter's wedding.

Having been confined to the house in disgrace, Sampath runs away from home and takes refuge in the branches of a guava tree in an abandoned orchard outside of town. At first family and townsfolk think he is mad, but in an inspired moment of self-preservation, Sampath, who had spent his time in the post office reading other people's mail, reveals some choice secrets about his persecutors and convinces them that he is, in fact, clairvoyant. It is not long before Mr. Chawla sees the commercial possibilities of having a holy man in the family, and quite soon the guava orchard becomes the latest stop along the spiritual tourism trail. A true hullabaloo erupts in the aftermath, as alcoholic monkeys, suspicious journalists, family members, and officious government workers all try to control the escalating noise ensuing from a confused young man's climb into a fruit tree.

Week 4

♦ SETTING ♦

Desai juxtaposes two main settings in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard to play off the ordinary and magical elements of her characters' lives. At the same time, the author intertwines the elements of setting and character in such a way that the two interact and animate one another.

The story begins in the city of Shahkot, in India. From the start, the town embodies the hearts of the people: it is high summer, and the town is suffering

from the longest drought in recent history. Against the backdrop of the drought's "murky yellow haze," Kulfi Chawla, a young woman of twenty-one years, is heavy with child. As her pregnancy advances, the drought grows worse; as the famine spreads, Kulfi's hunger becomes increasingly ravenous. Desai intertwines the setting and the characters right from the start of the novel, as displayed by her depiction of Kulfi's pregnancy: "Kulfi, in these months, was so enormously large, she seemed to be claiming all the earth's energy for herself, sapping it dry, leaving it withered, shriveled and yellow." In this withered setting, the people descry the state of their poverty and scorn Kulfi and her insatiable appetite.

The town of Shahkot is a microcosm of governmental bureaucracy and a symbol or emblem of the infringement of the group on individuals' free will. This infringement is best exemplified by the central location within Shahkot of the bazaar or the meeting place for merchants and shoppers. As the center of the town, the bazaar serves as the de facto jury of manners and class standing. This is a very public community, in large part because people must make their purchases and go about their daily business in this central shopping place, where gossip is the normal conversation, and it is socially acceptable for people to ask point-blank questions about other people's family's affairs. Pinky Chawla, the daughter of the Chawla family, is constantly obsessed with what the townspeople will think of her and is emotionally distraught when her father insists that her behavior in dressing to show off and then complaining of people noticing her is unacceptable. He consequently forces her to dress plainly when going to the bazaar, which, as a young lady, mortifies her. She is convinced, as many people of the town are, that one's social standing is determined by one's outward appearances.

In the center of town is the post office, "like so many government buildings, painted yellow." Sampath Chawla has worked for a while at the post office, and he rides his bike to work everyday, passing under the barbed-

wire fence that the government had erected to surround the postal building and give it a sense of official duty.

Naturally, the barbed-wire fence is not entirely intact, for the residents of Shahkot, never ones to respect such foolish efforts, had set to work as quickly as they could to dismantle this unfortunate obstruction. All about their own

houses and in their gardens and courtyards, they discovered a sudden need for wire.

The city environment juxtaposes the officious, self-referential manner of the Indian government with the inertia of human nature: whatever is set up shall soon be put down. Whatever disrupts the normal flow of life for the citizens will soon be battered into its rightful place in the hierarchy, far below the day-to-day needs of the citizens. At the end of the novel, the government officer, the CMO, has assigned himself a "much needed" vacation and organizes to leave, with a train of cars and luggage, from Shahkot on the very same day that two other governmental officers, the District Collector and the Brigadier, have commandeered troops to catch the drunken monkeys disrupting the townspeople. All of these people, along with several bystanders, get caught up in the winding streets of the town and they are not able to achieve the goals they set out to accomplish. The very stricture of the rules of the governmental bodies backfires, and the claustrophobia of the city streets magnifies their inability to plan with any kind of strategy or success.

In polarity to the city setting is Desai's depiction of the guava orchard, and, specifically, the guava tree which Sampath Chawla climbs in an effort to escape, the sitting. It is lush, ripe with fruit, and perfect for perching on in peace. Sampath wittingly went toward this tree and, in fleeing civilization, he landed in a fruit-bearing, sheltering tree that gave Sampath a newfound sense of peace and simplicity. All the bureaucratic inessentials of the city faded away, at least until the city came to the foot of the tree.

How beautiful it was here, how exactly as it should be. This orchard matched something he had imagined all his life: myriad green-skinned globes growing sweet-sour and marvelous upon a hillside with enough trees to fill the eye and enough fruit to scent the air___And these trees were not so big, or so thick with leaves, or so crowded together, as to obscure the sky, which showed clean through the branches.

So unlike the claustrophobia of the post office and the city streets, the guava orchard offers a perfect harmony of shade and openness, of prosperity and simplicity. However, after only a few days of peace, Sampath's family marches under the tree to demand his return to town and, quickly, the crowds began to gather. As Sampath becomes known as "Baba"—as a guru— pilgrims begin to

march into the orchard and settle down to listen to Sampath's words of wisdom. A makeshift town builds up, complete with a bargaining atmosphere, heaps of trash, and bickering. It is not long before the government intercedes, and soon the orchard looks rather like a city. As the orchard city burgeons, peace disappears, and eventually, Sampath flees the orchard altogether, leaving in his place a ripe, extended guava fruit.

Week 6

♦ THEMES AND CHARACTERS ♦

The main character in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is Sampath Chawla, a young Indian man who is caught in the wrath of a family married to the social mores of a bureaucratically shackled family. Sampath is incapable of organizing his thoughts and his life within the confines of the bureaucratic wheel, and he flows from station to

station in life, failing at everything he attempts. Sampath works as a sorter in the mailroom at the post office in his hometown of Shahkot, in India, and he performs his menial job with as much rote and thoughtlessness as possible.

From the outset of the novel, Sampath's mother, Kulfi, is depicted in magical terms. Throughout the novel, she expresses a sense of vague longing, that lonely sensation one has when it is clear that there exists some purpose or plan for one's life but the plan is not at all clear. Kulfi's house "was small for her big desire." At first, that desire takes the shape of food; she is famished throughout her pregnancy and becomes obsessed with food. Despite the drought engulfing Shahkot, Kulfi is determined to feed her insatiable desire. She bribes the vegetable and meat sellers at the bazaar, always driven by a fierce hunger she cannot stem. In the same way, when she begins to feel the movements of the baby inside of her, and with her hunger ever-increasing, Kulfi reacts by drawing pictures of eating scenes and pictures of food all over the walls of the Chawla family's home "in desperation for another landscape."

As her pregnancy advances, she does not simply become heavy and uncomfortable, but rather, "she seemed to be claiming all the earth's energy for herself, sapping it dry, leaving it withered, shriveled and yellow." Kulfi represents the incarnate desire for meaning in life beyond the daily drudgery

of going to work and returning home again, of going through the motions of a well-meaning life. Kulfi leaves the townspeople to their own doings, never integrating herself into the life of the bazaar or ingratiating herself to any of the people in town who hold positions of relative power, as was the norm with the other wives of the town. Rather, she keeps to herself, chin set straight ahead, mind clearly focused on "a point invisible to everybody but herself."

The novel jumps ahead to the point at which Sampath is on the verge of leaving his job and a kind of truce has occurred between Kulfi and the other family members. She roams around in her own way, not heeding the rest of the townswomen, and the family will grudgingly accept her state of mind as normal for her. They ritualize the act of complaining about her habits, but they do not try to change her.

However, Kulfi's restlessness finds its nest soon after Sampath climbs the guava tree to escape the claustrophobia of the city, and Kulfi, too, finds her way to freedom in the guava orchard. She takes to tending to her son's meals, and in doing so, she comes back round to the insatiability and joy she once experienced in seeking food for herself while pregnant with Sampath. She cooks everything and anything; the next meal stands as a constant joy to her, and she ends up discovering in the orchard and neighboring forests all manner of weeds and berries and stems to keep Sampath not only nutritionally sated but also a little intoxicated. Kulfi discovers that drugging her son keeps him happy and subdued, two characteristics which allow him to function as a placid, wise guru for the people of Shahkot and all who throughout India go on pilgrimage to hear him speak. Kulfi is the defining factor in Sampath's journey toward a more simpler lifestyle. From his very beginning, he is influenced by a kind of other-worldliness, a carelessness of thought that is typified by constant dreaming and disconnectedness with and inability to function within civilization's norms. Both characters represent a hyperbole of the extreme desire to stand alone, to have one's way on one's own terms.

In contrast to Kulfi, Sampath's father, Mr. Chawla, is a man for whom "oddness, like aches and pains, fits of tears and lethargy" is a source of discomfort; he fears "these uncontrollable, messy puddles of

life, the sticky humanness of things." This distaste for sticky humanness proves problematic for Mr. Chawla when his son becomes a young man full of feeling

and very little common sense or ambition. When Sampath runs away and climbs the guava tree, Mr. Chawla is initially horrified at the dishonor it may bring to his family name from the other townspeople, but soon he realizes that his son is a possible source of family stature and begins to find ways to capitalize, both socially and monetary, on his son's growing fame as a guru. Mr. Chawla is a main force in bringing the city to nature, of imposing all the creeds and contrivances of city life upon the free will of nature in the guava orchard. He hires a photographer to take Sampath's photo and then proceeds to sell the photos for profit.

When the monkeys descend upon the scene in the guava orchard and begin to steal alcohol from the town and grow increasingly unruly, it is Mr. Chawla who discovers how to rid the area of monkeys, a solution that the District Collector finally agrees to implement. He never bothers to ask his son what he would like to do; he decides what is best for his family name and, disregarding everything else, decides to get rid of the monkeys. He is smart and stupid at the same time�Mr. Chawla is a man of the city, constantly craning his neck for a better view of his stature within the city class system, absorbed with his own best interests. As such, he fails to look around and see a larger picture and so is constantly making unwise choices. When Sampath is first in the tree, Mr. Chawla does not ask him his reason but immediately seeks a way to get him to come down. He consults with a doctor and decides to find Sampath a wife. This, of course, leads to nothing but disaster; the bride-to-be tries to climb Sampath's tree, but she falls down and runs away. It is not at all clear that Mr. Chawla will ever learn from his own experience; he

is a foil to Sampath's awakening, and despite ail the extraordinary things that happen to his family, he remains, to the end, unmoved.

Sampath's sister. Pinky, goes through a transformation and then returns to her original state of thought. She is transformed by love, but when that love goes awry, the thoughts ingrained in her head by her father and grandmother about class and society immediately return. She is swept away when, one day in the bazaar, she falls in love with the ice cream seller. However, she falls in love with him while wearing a drab uniform her father had forced her to wear, and upon returning home, she bursts into tears: "her awful, awful father, who sent her out like a servant when other fathers went to all sorts of efforts to make sure their daughters looked well cared for and were properly dressed. Her

horrible grandmother, who had added to her humiliation. Her terrible, terrible family, who would no doubt ruin all her chances of love forever."

Against the odds, then, she goes on a rabid pursuit of the ice cream boy's affections, and the two youths engage in a secret love affair that is to culminate in an elopement. During this time, Pinky does not so much change her personality or mode of thought as she does alter her very determined mind. Rather than dress up to impress the men and women in town, she presses all of her energies into winning the Hungry Hop ice cream boy. Throughout this pursuit, Pinky finds a certain kinship with her brother. Whereas before she held only disdain for him, she begins to see that, although he is in her eyes a fraud as a guru, he is earnest in his efforts to make a life for himself. She takes a fresh consideration of Sampath's plight, and "she too understood the dreadfulness of life, recognized the need to be by herself with sadness, and from this moment of realization onward, she spent hours sitting under Sampath's tree, in a

private cocoon within which she indulged her every thought." When the drunk monkeys begin to mess up the orchard and the city officials are on the verge of forcing Sampath out of his tree, Pinky begs Sampath to escape the city with her and the Hungry Hop boy. However, though Pinky's feelings for her brother grow more amiable, in the end it is more because she does not want to be lonely than that she wishes to help her brother find peace and escape the mayhem. And when her Hungry Hop boy is caught in the nets of the officers who are going to try to capture the drunk monkeys, Pinky dispenses with her plan of escape and immediately sets her sights on the brigadier, placing her squarely back in the middle of societal gain and desire.

Week 8

♦ LITERARY QUALITIES ♦

The most notable literary quality that Desai employs is hyperbole. Desai makes each event that occurs in the novel far grander, by adding an almost magical description. A lost boy, frustrated by the indentured state of his life with a strictly structured society, runs away. But rather than running to a new city, he climbs a guava tree and decides to stay. His stay evolves into a state of sainthood, all because he read people's mail while working at the post office

and thus can speak to the people about their private affairs. When Kulfi is pregnant with Sampath, she is not just hungry, she is ravenous, totally obsessed by the idea of food. So much so that, when she can no longer bribe the market sellers for adequate food supplies, she begins to draw the food she desires all over the walls of her house.

When monkeys arrive on the scene in the guava orchard, instead of becoming part of the scene, they overtake all, discovering

stash of rum and immediately becoming insatiable alcoholics, bent on finding and imbibing every last drop of liquor in the area.

The absurdity of the scenes takes the reader out of a realist frame of reference, and with each passing event the suspension of belief is renewed. This device allows Desai to play with dream images and to truly allow anything to transpire in the text. At times, the marked absurdity, the very unpredictability of the story, caves in on itself and makes the story actually quite predictable. Because even the most absurd happenstance becomes common, Desai risks allowing the magical occurrences to almost predict themselves. For instance, when the reader learns that the spy from the Atheist Society is creeping closer to the pot in which Kulfi is preparing to catch and cook a monkey, it becomes obvious that he is going to wind up in the pot himself. And so, when he does, it is grotesque to imagine, but not at all a surprise.

However, for the most part, the magical imagery allows the reader to loosen the strictures of what is allowed to happen in the course of the book's events, and it adds a powerful element to her writing.

Desai is a masterful dialogue writer, and she uses this skill to great effect in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. She infuses the dialogue with local idioms and paints a vivid portrait of life in a small city in India. The hypocrisy of social expectations and the absurdity of bureaucratic red tape show themselves through the language and conversations of the people.

After Sampath's grandmother, Ammaji, purchases her new dentures, she gets an ice cream cone and immediately lodges her teeth into the frozen cream. The Circus Monkey who hangs around the bazaar mistakes them for a bag of peanuts and runs away with them. Ammaji chases angrily after the monkey,

yelling:

"Give them back. They're of no use to you, you stupid donkey."

"Stupid monkey, maji," said Hungry Hop, stopping in mid-track, stunned at her mistaking such vastly different animals for each other. "He's a monkey, not a donkey."

"Monkey-dunkey," shouted Ammaji. "Don't just stand there. Go after him."

And off Hungry Hop runs, remembering his duty, and recovers the dentures from the monkey.

Bureaucratic idiocy comes to the fore at the end of the novel, when various departments are set into motion in the early hours of the morning that the Brigadier and District Collector have planned to capture the drunk monkeys. The Brigadier commandeers

his troops to march through the city to the orchard, and they smack straight into a pile of suitcases and bedrolls spread along the street. Seeing the Chief Medical Officer amongst the bags and bedding, the Brigadier shouts:

"What are you doing, fatso?" ...

The CMO turned pale. "Are you referring to me?" he asked with dignity. "If so, I think you should keep your words to yourself until you know the state of my health!"

"Move," shouted the Brigadier. "Move, move, move yourself and your bloody belongings. Now!" ...

"Due to health problems, I have been forced to take vacation leave in Dasauli. Every now and then you know, in times of stress�"

"Just move," shouted the Brigadier in purple rage. "Move your hundreds of damn suitcases."

"Oh dear," said the DC, watching the ensuing hullabaloo, "and I myself signed that vacation leave. I suppose it was my fault."

Even the governmental entities working together cannot seem to make their

agendas and schedules coincide. Hullabaloo seems to be the only reigning state of affairs in Shahkot.

Colorful description also imbues the novel with rich texture. The Brigadier is "dark as a monsoon cloud." When Kulfi is cooking meals for Sampath, her rapture carries over into the process of cooking itself.

A single grain of one thing, a bud of another, a moist fingertip dipped lightly into a small vial and then in to the bubbling pot; a thimble full, a matchbox full, a coconut shell full of dark crimson and deep violet, of dusty yellow spice, the entire concoction simmered sometimes for a day or two... The meats were beaten to silk, so spiced and fragrant they clouded the senses; the sauces were full of strange

hints and dark undercurrents, leaving you on firm ground one moment, dragging you under the next.

When describing the town, Desai's writing edges toward the poetic. In the night, a car passes through the streets:

A passing car sent its searchlight-glare crazy and liquid over the sides of the buildings and into the trees, revealing not the colors, the daylight solidity of things, but a world of dark gaps cut from an empty skin of light.

Then, as daylight ascends, the writing turns more critical:

Sampath watched as the shadows retreated, as Shahkot was offered up once again, whole and intact, with its overflowing rubbish heaps and its maze of streets. Bit by bit he saw the jumble of wires spilling out at the top of the electricity pole and the dirty, stained walls of the houses that rose high all about him, with their complications of rooftops and verandas; their clutter of television aerials, watching lines and courtyards filled with bicycles and raggedy plants and all the paraphernalia of large and loud families.

Week 10

♦ SOCIAL SENSITIVITY ♦

The main issue Desai confronts in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is that of nature versus civilization. As mentioned in the setting, Desai makes strong

statements throughout the book regarding the problems inherent in man's encroachment upon the natural order of things. At the start of the book, the newspaper from which Mr. Chawla reads aloud reports all manner of explanations for the drought that Shahkot is experiencing. The monsoons have not yet come, and the people fear for their crops and their livelihoods and so seek solace in dreaming up reasons for the monsoons' absence. They look for something or someone to blame, to fill up the space of worry

they have created in the face of a natural, inexplicable force.

Likewise, when Sampath runs away to the guava orchard, at first there is a sense of jubilation and freedom in his thoughts and responses to people's questions. He feels unfettered by man's tendency to categorize and process, and even the unruly monkeys are calmed as they sit in the tree. But nature cannot escape man's encroachment for long, and as the throngs of pilgrims grow, and the orchard begins to resemble a city, the monkeys return to their malicious ways, rummaging for alcohol and terrorizing the pilgrims and even Sampath. It is as though the monkeys represent the wrath of nature in the face of the people's defacement of it. Nature has come full circle, and man must face the consequences of his autocratic treatment of nature.

Weeks 11 - 14

♦ TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION ♦

1.    Why is Sampath so distraught with his life in Shahkot? Are these feelings normal?

2.    What is the significance of the monkeys' arrival in the guava orchard?

3.    Characterize the relationship between Sampath and his mother. Is it a strong relationship?

4.    Characterize the relationship between Sampath and his sister. Is this a normal relationship between siblings? How does the relationship change in the course of the novel?

5.    What is "magical realism?" Were you able to move beyond the fact that the events in the novel were improbable, or did their improbability distract you

from the story?

6.    Why does Kulfi resort to painting pictures on the walls of the Chawla home? Does this action seem to help her?

7.    Explain how Desai uses descriptions of food in the novel.

8.    How would you describe the importance of community to these characters?

9.    How is the image of the city treated in the novel?

10.  What is the significance of the guava tree, besides being the place to which Sampath runs when he runs away from home?