‘Holes in dosas in everyone’s house’: What ‘Ghachar Ghochar’ taught me about the Indian middle class and wealth

One of the most haunting aspects of Ghachar Ghochar is how normal everything feels. The family never indulges in overt displays of power. There are no villains here, no screaming matches. Just a slow, insidious reshaping of values as money replaces meaning. Conversations become colder. People are kept in check. Everything is done “for the family” – a phrase used as both shield and weapon.

A copy of Vivek Shanbhag’s ‘Ghachar Ghochar’ on the columnists’ coffee table. (Photo: Stela Dey)

At one point, when the family discusses someone who challenged their ways, the ease with which they speak about manipulation – of protecting themselves, of silencing threats – is chilling. Nothing is said outright, but it doesn’t need to be. Shanbhag excels at creating tension through what is not said.

The story plays out largely within the walls of the family home and a small cafe where the narrator retreats for solitude. It’s there that he encounters Vincent – the cafe’s calm, enigmatic waiter who offers the only real wisdom in the book. Vincent doesn’t say much, but his words are razor-sharp. Through one-liners and quiet observations, he functions as the narrator’s unacknowledged conscience.

The narrator’s passivity becomes the book’s greatest tension. He is not the instigator of harm, but he is a silent witness. He benefits from the system he knows is rotting.

It’s in this cafe that we also sense the narrator’s internal split: he knows his family has lost its way, that the wealth has contorted their sense of right and wrong, but he cannot – or will not – stand apart from it. He is not evil, not cruel, but complicit.

“Holes in dosas in everyone’s house, sir,” Vincent says early on. The narrator keeps connecting his one-liners to his life. Later, his final words to the narrator cut like a knife – not a rebuke, but a truth so clear it’s impossible to forget. ‘Sir, you may want to wash your hand. There’s blood on it.’

In a book filled with half-truths and rationalisations, Vincent’s voice stands out: unambiguous, honest, and terrifying in its clarity. He never accuses, but he sees.

‘Delusion of the moral high ground’

It’s a discomfort that mirrors the larger Indian middle-class condition: caught between old-world ideals and new-world aspirations, clinging to the illusion of moral high ground while making peace with transactional realities. The narrator’s family is not unlike many real ones – seeking success without scrutiny, comfort without consequence. Their rise is not unusual. What makes it remarkable is how carefully Shanbhag shows its cost.

The title itself, Ghachar Ghochar – a nonsensical phrase in the narrator’s marriage, meaning “tangled beyond repair” – is the perfect metaphor for what transpires. The characters are caught in a web of their own making, emotionally and ethically ensnared, but too ensconced in comfort to break free. Their wealth doesn’t liberate them; it quietly erodes them. And worse, it convinces them they’re better than they are.

Upward mobility comes at a price

This is not an unfamiliar story in contemporary India, where class mobility often arrives with an invisible price tag. The nation’s economic rise has birthed a new middle class eager to distinguish itself from both its working-class roots and the elite circles it now courts.

Families like the narrator’s became the new elite – not through lineage or education, but through enterprise. Yet with wealth came the fear of loss, the tightening of control, and the need to protect status at any cost. Shanbhag captures this with quiet brilliance: a family that once huddled together in adversity now builds walls to keep others out.

The novella also offers a stark portrayal of how women are treated when they defy these invisible codes.

The narrator’s wife Anita – an outsider, observer, and moral compass – questions the family’s choices, pushing him to confront what he’s ignoring. But her voice becomes increasingly unwelcome in a household that has no appetite for dissent. Her honesty is a threat; her clarity, an intrusion. And eventually, like all inconvenient truths in tightly sealed worlds, she is pushed to the margins.

A woman who arrives at the family home, seeking acknowledgment and dignity, is quickly painted as a threat. She is mistreated, but not violently – she is simply erased. That, Shanbhag seems to suggest, is often more dangerous. Violence leaves bruises, erasure leaves nothing.

And so, when the climax comes, it is quiet. No confrontation, no moral reckoning. Just a moment of shattering realisation for the reader and the narrator, while the characters carry on, unaware or uncaring. It is a brilliant, brutal twist – one that lingers long after the last page, even a decade after the novella was published.

Shanbhag’s distinct Indian tragedy interrogates the costs of comfort, the ways we rationalise moral decay, and how the pursuit of wealth can make us strangers to ourselves. But it also asks: when the damage is done, when the knots are too tight to undo – what then?

Some families fall apart. Others, like this one, stay together. But they become ghachar ghochar.