A Short History of Everything

This book is a private history of childhood – an age peppered with the little discoveries of friendship and sex, the gnawing despair of school, and the attractions and repulsion’s of family life. It is funny. But it is not so funny. It has the classroom chicks and adolescent pornography. Ram, the book’s protagonist, grows up in the India of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The political history of the time, the social setting of an Indian middle class existence stretches to encompass the circumstances of his own life; the flux of adolescence – thoughts on people and phenomena – Gandhi, Nehru, Zeenat Aman, Socrates, Imperialism, pornography, the first kiss, even Newton – all act as critical markers, real and imagined, in the coming of age. Born into the quiet world of post-independence India, Ram’s perception of things alters with time, as indeed does the view of his own family. From familial and protective characters, they change into real people, with problems and misguided relationships that cross into the uncomplicated boundaries of childhood and create trouble in his psyche. His father’s domination is discovered as having a brutal edge; his mother’s tenderness towards the family servant and his own discovery of an incestuous longing, are the cause of the story’s final and tragic end.  In brief, this is a literary enactment: of author’s real and fictitious childhood with bizarre characters in the lucid backdrop of a massive old Delhi house.