Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (original 1998; edition 1999)

HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD

Although the publishers of "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard" have been comparing the book to Arundhati Roy's award-winning novel "God of Small Things," 27-year old Kiran Desai turns out to have less in common with Ms. Roy or Salman Rushdie than with an older generation of Indian writers, including her mother, Anita Desai, and R.K. Narayan. There are no grand, mythic visions at work in "Hullabaloo," no ambitious displays of magical realism. Rather, the novel stands as a meticulously crafted piece of gently comic satire -- a small, finely tuned fable that attests to the author's pitch-perfect ear for character and mood, and her natural storytelling gifts.

As Mr. Narayan has done in his well-known Malgudi stories, Ms. Desai has conjured up a small Indian town, poised midway between tradition and modernity, and focused on the life of one of that town's anonymous inhabitants -- a dreamy, introspective fellow torn between his familial obligations and his own desire to be left alone.

In the case of "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," this dreamer is a slovenly young man named Sampath Chawla, who was born in the town of Shahkot during a historic monsoon that ended months of drought. For years, Sampath has done nothing to live up to the expectations wrought by his auspicious birth: he has sleepwalked through school, daydreamed through work. Since getting a job at the local post office, he has spent most of his free time reading other people's mail and musing about their lives.

Although Sampath causes his go-getter father endless grief, his grandmother prophesizes great things: "But the world is round," she declares. "Wait and see! Even if it appears he is going downhill, he will come up out on the other side. Yes, on top of the world. He is just taking the longer route."

Because "Hullabaloo" is the kind of fable where prophecies always come true, Sampath's grandmother is quickly proven correct. Not long after Sampath runs away from home and takes up residence in a guava tree with a band of monkeys, he is being acclaimed as the hermit of Shahkot, a visionary blessed with "an unusual spiritual nature." His furtive reading of other people's mail has endowed him with what seems like the power of second sight, just as his simple-minded love of adages promotes a reputation for "unfathomable wisdom."

If Sampath's incongruous enshrinement as a wise man plays off the hallowed Indian tradition of spiritual enlightenment, the events that accompany his newly discovered holiness read like an out-and-out sendup of the Western cult of celebrity. Sampath's ambitious father is soon gussying up his son's orchard bower (trying hard to keep a balance "between the look of abstemiousness and actual comfort") and concocting a host of moneymaking schemes designed to capitalize on his son's newfound fame. Soon, buses and rickshaws are bringing tourists to visit "the famous Baba in his treetop hermitage," and making Sampath's family rich.

All is not well, however. Sampath's monkey companions have developed a taste for liquor and become a growing public nuisance. Worse, a spy for the local Atheist Society has vowed to expose Sampath as a fraud. "It was precisely people like Sampath who obstructed the progress of this nation, keeping honest, educated people like him in the backwaters along with them," the spy thinks. "They ate away at these striving, intelligent souls, they ate away at progress and smothered anybody who tried to make a stand against the vast uneducated hordes, swelling and growing toward the biggest population of idiots in the world."

Ms. Desai does a clever, dexterous job of orchestrating these events, and in doing so introduces a sprawling cast of characters rendered in bright folk-art colors. There's Sampath's immediate family, of course: his hustling, status-conscious father; his eccentric, ditsy mother and his pushy, man-handling sister. And then there are the town officials, charged with containing the hullabaloo surrounding Sampath: Vermaji, a monkey expert who is puffed up with self-importance; the brigadier, who would rather count the birds in his garden than preside over his troops, and the superintendent of police, who neglects his duties in hopes of being demoted. Filling out the cast are Sampath's former colleagues at the post office, an unfortunate ice cream vendor who catches the attention of Sampath's bossy sister and a chorus of pilgrims and tourists.

These bumbling characters may teeter on the edge of caricature, but the author delineates them with such wit and bemused affection that they insinuate themselves insidiously in our minds, even as they lend the fictional town of Shahkot a palpable fairy tale charm. With "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," Ms. Desai has made a modest but enchanting debut.