If laughter is the best medicine, nothing can do you better than a dose of No Onions Nor Garlic. Your food may taste a little bland but life will not lack for spice—as the characters of Srividya Natarajan’s latest novel found out.

My progress with the book was more than a little slow, given that every page or so I found myself rolling on the floor and was obliged to get up and brush myself off before I could carry on. Campus life can be endlessly entertaining.

But add a whacko professor hung up on his Brahminical credentials, his sex-starved wife bent on chasing godmen and parents eager for an NRI “catch”––and even a theme of faculty infighting on caste politics can leave you in stitches.

It is not just the antics of the couples that get the laughs. There’s the builder (“Professor Ram openedhic my eyes to religion. Glories of hic-hic-Hinduism”); the wannabe academic (“The entire discursive economy of post-coloniality in terms that take into account the polyhegemonic rather than panoptic operations of identity and authority…”); the concerned grandmother (“If you don’t wear a boddy those will be hanging down to here…dingle-dongling before you are thirty”); the politically aspiring auto-driver; the nervous music teacher who thinks only the coffee justifies this particular tuition; the cowpats placed strategically on paintings hailed as “modernist collage” by unsuspecting guests; the “bucket maami” who places 30 pots in queue before the water lorry turns up—the fabric of life stands unravelled.

... contd.