'It's true what they say - it's not we who control money, it's the money that controls us. When there's only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us.' From a cramped, ant-infested house to a spacious bungalow, a family finds itself making a transition in many ways. The narrator, a sensitive young man, is numbed by the swirl around him. All he can do is flee every day to an old-world cafe, where he seeks solace from an oracular waiter. As members of the family realign their equations and desires, new strands are knotted, others come apart, and conflict brews dangerously in the background. Masterfully translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, Ghachar Ghochar is a suspenseful, playful and ultimately menacing story about the shifting consequences of success.

Vivek Shanbhag writes in Kannada. He has published five short story collections, three novels and two plays, and has edited two anthologies, one of them in English. For 7 years from 2005 to 2012, he published and edited the literary journal Desha Kaala. Vivek’s books are translated into many other Indian languages. His acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar was published in India in English translation in 2015.

Vivek's writing has appeared in Granta, Seminar, Indian Literature and Out of Print.

He was a Fall 2016 resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

An engineer by training, Vivek Shanbhag lives in Bangalore, India.