"They do not mind, the clerk tells Sunny when he interviews him over the phone, because they understand his determination to do something that nobody else has done: The point is not about having longer fingernails than anyone; what is important is that I am firing up the younger generation to be ambitious. If I can do it, I tell them, I who used to have no discipline, then you can also reach your dream of fame."
"The story is, Sunny realises, excellent copy, even if his piece enrages the long-nailed man, who deems him an outsider pretending to be an insider, and a cheating outsider at that. There's an echo of Desai's own experience of writing her debut novel, 1998's Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which drew on the apparently true story of a man who lived up a tree for 15 years to escape an unhappy marriage, and which roused the ire of the Nepali community she depicted."
Sunny Bhatia travels to Allahabad and struggles to decode convoluted newspaper headlines, then encounters similar incomprehension while working in New York. He finds more accessible human-interest stories: a woman sold at a Rajasthan cattle fair and a retired Mysore railway clerk whose fingernails have grown so long that his family attends to his every physical need. The clerk frames his feat as inspiring younger generations toward ambition and becomes angered by Sunny's portrayal. The narrative evokes earlier controversies over fictional portrayals of communities and repeatedly stages the unresolved insider/outsider tension across multiple interwoven storylines, while probing the theme of work.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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