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For many Indians, owning a home is their biggest dream. Not the house that has been passed down to them from their parents, but the one that they have bought with their own money. This is an expensive dream, and not meant to be realised early in life. Owning a house is like doing penance – there must be sweat and blood and decades of hardship, and the fruit it will bear will have been sweetened with perseverance and sacrifice.
Every hardworking, decent Indian knows this. And so do the corrupt, scheming builders who squeeze dry the good people of their very last penny. In the end, the dream doesn’t come true, but life becomes a living nightmare.
Desperate times
Retired government employee Mr Shivaswamy is going through a similar hell in MR Dattathri’s novel, What’s Your Price, Mr Shivaswamy?. Translated from the Kannada by the author, it tells the story of an elderly man’s desperate attempts to arrange an additional eight lakh rupees that the builders of his new flat have demanded from him if he wants to move in without further delay. Unwilling to ask his children for help and too proud to borrow, Shivaswamy decides to join the workforce. After decades of service in the public sector in Ghaziabad, he is not prepared for the cut-throat corporate culture of Bangalore. However, this is not the time to make excuses – desperate times call for desperate measures.
Once Shivaswamy joins the DT Group as a senior HR staff, he realises that his appointment has not been a unanimous decision, and certainly not a happy one. The drifts in the Thakkar family – the owners of the DT Group – have created camps within the company with each vying for power and influence. The MD, Dhaval Thakkar’s, daughter-in-law rules with an iron fist without being on the official roll of employees. The strange dynamics at the office confuses Shivaswamy, who, for the most part, has never been a serious player in office politics. He’s the senior-most employee by age at the DT Group and the elderly MD takes a shine to him – soon seeing him as a friend and confidant, and later, a brother in faith.
Where are the desperate measures?
The problem with What’s Your Price, Mr Shivaswamy? is that at no point is Shivaswamy asked his price. As a thorough family man, he minds his business both at home and at work. When the tensions at the office become apparent, he skirts his way around every person of authority and manages to keep himself from harm’s way. Perhaps it is his compliant nature or his empathetic ear, Shivaswamy finds himself being pulled in every direction. Yet, he is never in a truly sticky situation, nor is he at any point given an ultimatum. The only price that he perhaps pays for getting involved in the company’s mess is an occasional headache or a fever. For all its faults, the company doesn’t force him to compromise on his ideals or take sides when he doesn’t want to.
Financing a house is a tricky, expensive affair. The years of financial strain can break families and certainly sour marriages. The urgency to earn money, and earn it quickly, can disturb the peace of the Zenest of minds. Added to this is the brute roguishness of builders; and in India, they often function like low-level gangsters. Threatening, striking under-the-table deals, and physical violence are essential in this nexus. What’s Your Price, Mr Shivaswamy? fails glaringly by not taking this into account. Besides the stress of his corporate job, we don’t really learn of the mental toll that our protagonist is under. This in turn, doesn’t let the readers realise the full extent of his helplessness, even though by himself, Shivaswamy is a generally likeable character.
His wife, Revathi, leaves for the US to look after their pregnant daughter. By putting Revathi on the plane at the outset of the story, the author does not let her have a full presence in Shivaswamy’s story. And the novel loses out on what could have been its strongest theme: how desperation and fear affect happy marriages. By alienating Shivaswamy from his family, we never truly understand the psychological and emotional wreckage of clinging to a lost dream.
At some point, the novel forgets what it is about. The reader is sucked into the vortex of family–corporate drama which feels tedious in every aspect – after all, this is the story of every family business, disintegration is the only natural end. But, the reader sees so much of the internal crisis of the Thakkar family that they have to stop to wonder who the story is really about. A more suitable description of the novel would perhaps be a second coming of a retired man in the workplace, or a corporate drama with a sweet subplot of making a friend in one’s twilight years.
What’s Your Price, Mr Shivaswamy?, MR Dattathri, translated from the Kannada by the author, Penguin India.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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