Book Review in Asian Age - Nov 27th

Desi nerd, gori hottie!
Nov 27, 2011 - Janice Pariat

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Some of the world’s best authors for children, Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, have one thing in common — they treat their young audience with respect. Their stories don’t shy away from death, loss and grief because they know that kids are surprisingly tensile and strong, and shouldn’t bemollycoddled.

Karan Puri’s debut novel (the rather charmingly titled) Shit Happens! deals with another sort of trauma: The nerdy, average-looking desi boy living in America. We are jolted (literally, for the book begins with an alarm clock nearly going off) into the world of Anurag Sinha, a teenager blessed with brains but very little cool. Naturally, this affects his entire being and, more importantly, his social life. He’s ridiculed in school by all the popular kids and makes an a** of himself in front of the prettiest girl in his class who tries to cosy up to him to get her homework done on time.

It is, all in all, a pretty “shitty existence” in Delhi. Anurag takes his revenge by using the only thing he can — his cerebral prowess — and hightails out of his school, his city, and country, to America, the land of dreams, on a student scholarship to the University of Rochester (where, incidentally, the author also studied).

Clearly, this is the only way to worm your way out of being bullied. The rest of the book follows the trails, tribulations and joys (of, amongst other things, using slang, and having a White girlfriend) of our protagonist as he wrestles with life and all its boozy student nights and strange coincidences.

America may be the Promised Land in all the movies, but Anurag finds out soon enough that living there comes with its own set of problems — of not fitting in, of rediscovering one’s own identity, and finally whether to return home or not.

We can see what Puri’s trying to do here — make us laugh at and empathise with Anurag all at the same time — yet, while back in 1991 Anurag Mathur’s Inscrutable Americans did genuinely effect some faint sniggers, Shit Happens! falters because the authorial voice doesn’t sit well on the pages. It is very much “a grown-up trying to write through the eyes of a teenager”, and that, apart from making for stumbling reading, also keeps us at a distance from Anurag. It doesn’t merge seamlessly into one. It is never his voice we hear but the author’s, and that shatters all the make-believe we might try to muster.

Janice Pariat, a freelance writer, is based in Shillong