Adults deconstructed

You know you want to read a book when you are laughing out loud by the time you turn the first page. That is what Daman Singh's The Sacred Grove does. It is a story of the rise of the ugly face of India's communal divide from the point of view of Ashwin, a 12 year old and son of a bureaucrat in a town where decent folks live. It is also a rites of passage story about how a young boy thinks, feels, reacts, and how we adults impose our own biases on our children.

The Sacred Grove
Daman Singh
HarperCollins
Rs 299; Pp 248

The book is mostly interior monologue and quite like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, we participate in the story from a space where the responses to the situations is on the lines of: I like, I dislike, okay that, well fine ... Ashwin's wry humour and dead-pan narration holds the reader. Throughout the book there is not a single sentence, word or punctuation that is not the voice of the narrator. The author speaks completely through her character and the character always stays in his role. Showing a story and not telling it is a rare feat to handle. Daman has done very well.

...when Sarita Ma'am told us to turn to Page 63, I got a shock on my life. There was a slice of a man, completely naked, with his thing hanging sadly down for all of us to study. Nothing private about it at all. In the beginning reproduction was about a fat amoeba squeezing into two daughter cells. Then bread mould sending up antennae which burst into millions of spores. And flowers, which were okay too. ... Now it was the turn of humans. Our turn. Luckily there were no practicals. Naturally Varun was disappointed. He was just a kid, not like the rest of us.

Full report here Businessworld