Book review
Amandeep, Murugesh, Rufus and Sundar are bucks who talk dirty for the same reason that they remove the mufflers from their motorcycle exhausts—it makes them feel like men. Like libertines.

To their hormonal despair, when Professor Ram stages his remake of A Midsummer Night's Dream at their college fest, he casts these four as fairies. The farce that follows gradually takes over the lives of the rest of the characters in this achingly funny novel about the pratfalls that accompany caste pride.

On and off the campus of Chennai University, you will encounter onion-and-garlic-free TamBrahms who rewrite Shakespeare to uphold the Hindu order, smug NRIs who call the shots in matrimonials, visiting Canadians who are aghast at the plight of Dalits (pronounced ‘daylights') and, at the apex of the whole tumbling structure, a bibulous builder who invokes the gods even as he defrauds his clients.

Tailing the characters around this plot is an unseen but all-seeing spectator. You may never guess who that is, but will laugh all the way to the answer.


About the author Srividya Natarajan, born in Chennai, now lives in Canada and teaches English at King`s University College, University of Western Ontario. At the University of Hyderabad she became interested in the caste politics that are central to No Onions, Nor Garlic, parented both her own son and the snakes her husband brought home, and earned a PhD in English. After a year as an editor at Katha Publishers, she began to illustrate children`s books for Orient Longman, the Karaditales Company and Chatterbox . Her favourite projects were four books in Tulika`s Under the Banyan series, now translated into six Indian languages, and Kali and the Rat Snake. She co-authored Taking Charge of Our Bodies, on women and health issues, with Veena Shatrugna and Gita Ramaswamy (Penguin India, 2004); and co-directed Silambakoodam (2002), a documentary on the hereditary dance teachers of south India. A student of the great dance master Kittappa Pillai, she has taught and performed classical dance for over twenty-two years in India and abroad. Her ambition is to combine writing her second novel with living in a tolerably clean house.