Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Sampath Chawla's flight into the orchard tree reads, for the first stretch of the novel, as simple failure dressed up as eccentricity, a clerk who can't hold a job or meet his family's modest expectations finding the one form of retreat nobody can order him down from, and Desai gets sustained comedy from how fast Shahkot converts that retreat into sanctity, his most ordinary mutterings reinterpreted as wisdom the moment enough people decide to listen for it.

His mother Kulfi, whose lifelong obsession with elaborate cooking has always outpaced the family's means, finds in Sampath's sudden fame a vocation of her own, feeding the pilgrims who gather beneath the tree increasingly baroque dishes, and Desai lets Kulfi's appetite and Sampath's withdrawal read as matched responses to the same starved, provincial life, one parent expanding outward as the son shrinks into a single branch. Sampath's younger sister Pinky, meanwhile, wants nothing more exotic than an ordinary romance and an ice cream van driver she's fixed on marrying, and her thwarted, thoroughly unspiritual ambitions sit next to her brother's accidental sainthood as Desai's reminder that Shahkot's other residents have wants of their own that nobody is building a shrine around.

The langurs that move into the orchard and discover a devotee's stash of rum-soaked snacks escalate the satire from family comedy into civic farce: a troop of drunk, increasingly violent monkeys becomes a genuine administrative crisis, and the government's response, culminating in an armed operation against an orchard, says more about the state's priorities than anything it ever does for Shahkot's actual poor.

Sampath's father, furious and humiliated by his son's flight up a tree, and his mother Kulfi, quietly delighted by the fame it brings, pivot from crisis management to profit within a few chapters, his disgrace repackaged as a tourist attraction almost before anyone thinks to ask whether Sampath actually wants disciples at all.

The langurs smashing crockery, raiding kitchens, and terrifying the district administration give Desai her sharpest satire in the book: watching how quickly the state mobilizes an armed operation against inconvenience while leaving Shahkot's actual poverty untouched, a monkey problem gets more official urgency than a human one ever did.