The professor, with his bad pronunciation and great respect for the Anglo-Saxon sense of order, is based on a teacher Joshi came across while staying in Mukteshwar. Joshi himself appears in the book as the narrator and as a character — a young writer, looking for a peaceful retreat, who takes on a job as a temporary teacher in Sunaulidhar village school. Joshi as novelist depicts the society he saw around him. In this role he mocks others but none so much as himself, the literary pretensions of his peers and the leftist progressive writers who had addas in Almora in his youth. What attracted Ira Pande to this novel and made her translate it is that although short, it works on so many levels.

Joshi was Pande’s uncle. Her mother was the best-selling Hindi writer Shivani. By coincidence, I have just finished one of Shivani’s highly readable novels, Mayapuri. It is about an educated but impoverished young woman — again from a village in the hills — who loves and is loved by a married man but remains virtuous to the end. T’ta Professor, in contrast, is a stranger to such virtue. Joshi deals with a more sordid, perhaps a more realistic, masculine world. Sexual abstinence is not a characteristic of T’ta Professor beyond a term he learns the meaning of during the course of the book — coitus interruptus. Romance is not his style either. Part of the book’s humour comes from the incongruity of T’ta Professor’s exalted position as a pillar in the community, and his low sexual exploits.

... contd.