A thin, short man with illusions of grandeur, Khashtivallabh Pant, Dubbul MA, is a school teacher in a remote Kumaoni village, where he is mockingly referred to as T’ta Professor. A great admirer of the Englishman’s attire, T’ta is also deeply in awe of the white man’s language. He always carries a notebook to jot down English words that he hears for the first time, acknowledging a word as acceptable only after he has consulted his Oxford Dictionary. His vanity makes him a terrific target for lampooning and the narrator in this novel, a writer who never manages to finish the stories he sets out to write, is determined to produce a biting satire, and wastes no time finding out more about T’ta life.

When T’ta starts to tell his tale, what begins as an innocent idyll turns quickly into an erotic and scatological romp, and T’ta turns from a ridiculous comic character into a pathetic pervert. As the story unravels, the multiple narratives reveal a complex figure, comic and tragic by turns, and the novel changes gear and darkens into a gothic bleakness of unimaginable dimensions.

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