Jaishree Misra takes on a light tone for A House for Mr Misra on the challenges she and Mr Misra faced while building a beach house at Kovalam. It is a cautionary tale and one that anyone who ever has had anything to do at a government office in India can identify with.
And while obtaining the simplest documentation can be fraught with hassles, Misra isn’t doing any old paperwork. She is unwittingly taking on the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) behemoth in building this house.
Misra writes in an easy style, even in moments of existentialist angst or when she does a cultural analysis of the Malayali from a first-person perspective. This works best for the humorous tenor of the book. But there is a strange fixation with the ‘amygdala’. She stresses the role of this brain matter right through the book as if she is trying to build this as a motif, but it doesn’t quite hit the spot.
In writing the book, Misra says that there is an element of ‘activism’ but she is also keen not to be didactic about it, and she manages the balance very well. She pokes more than gentle fun at the state of the state: the failing waste management, Thiruvananthapuram Corporation’s less-than-successful move to computerisation, the puzzling appeal of tourism in Kerala, the hygiene or abject lack of it at the prestigious medical college hospital and not least, the CRZ.
It is a much-needed mirror held up to the system. You hope some minister or babu reads the book and feels some change, however small, might be worthwhile. Of course, it might be asking for too much. Books like Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City or even Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, which were the toast of the town, are not known for making a societal impact.
Luckily for Misra, during the course of building the house, she learns that almost every law in India has a loophole. So while the Mr and Mrs seem to have one problem after the other thrown at them, they are also able to eventually sail through.
It is like an episode of the hit US sitcom Modern Family—if you are willing to be patient while facing each problem and look at it from a different perspective, a solution will soon enough work out. Ok, so not everyone is this lucky, but then when someone is and gives us an entertaining account at the end of it, we are happy to cheer her on.