Three days into the new millennium, several denizens of Ammanagudi Street in south-eastern Bangalore encounter a strange creature. Half man, half beast, he seems to be scurrying into the darkness of a power outage. Thus begins the intriguing tale of The Monkey-Man by K.R. Usha. Although a reader expects a magical realist or apocalyptic tale with the millennial setting and lurking beasts, the novel wends its way through the lives of the denizens—Shrinivas Moorty, Neela Mary Gopalrao, Pushpa Rani, and Sukhiya Ram. The three are invited to go live on a radio show with Bali Brums, an RJ, whose real name is Balaji Brahmendra, to discuss this odd sighting. This is the occasion of the novel and the opportunity for the author to bring several disparate characters’ lives into her narrative. The novel is less concerned with unraveling the mystery of the strange beast and becomes instead a story about the new post-liberalization India and its rising urban star, Bangalore.

Shrinivas Moorty is a college professor who is married to the beautiful and somewhat eccentric Lily. Through the narration of his life, his college days influenced by a Marxist professor, his love for his classmate Geeta, his friendship with Jairam, his passion of film, and his complicated marriage to Lily, Usha captures a history of postcolonial India. In Neela Mary Gopalrao, executive secretary to an influential man at a think tank, we glimpse the life of a woman of dual religious heritage who schemes her way into power while investing all her passions and sexual frustrations in a strange relationship with Bali Brums. Pushpa Rani is the poster child for the post-liberalization, new world economy of India. Born in poverty and raised in a one room tenement, she now works for a call center and brings financial security to her family. Sukhiya Ram is a migrant from the North, an erstwhile construction worker turned peon at Neela Mary Gopalrao’s office. Each of these stories is linked in unexpected ways besides their close encounter with the beast, and through these lives Usha captures the texture of life in the Bangalore of the last two decades.

While Salman Rushdie and Vikram Chandra have mapped Bombay in Indian English literature and Amitav Ghosh has captured the many lives of Calcutta in postcolonial India, other cities have remained somewhat obscure. Now Usha puts Bangalore on the map—this is a loving yet humorous tribute to the city, its renaissance, its inhabitants, its blend of global and parochial, high tech and low tech, sacred and profane, the extraordinary and the mundane. This is a novel to be savored slowly like a hot cup of coffee on a cool Bangalore morning. And that strange hairy beast? Well, he shows up periodically—is he a symbol for something? Or is there another explanation for his sighting? That’s for each reader to discover.

Book Description: 3 January 2000. It is the start of the new millennium. On Ammanagudi Street in Bangalore, a strange creature is spotted. As the beast seizes the imagination of the city, the first people to sight it—Shrinivas Moorty, a teacher in a local college, Pushpa Rani, who works in a call centre, Neela Mary Gopalrao, secretary to an influential man, and Sukhiya Ram, her office boy—are invited to talk about it on Bali Brums’s hugely popular radio show. What was it that they saw? A bat? A malevolent avatar? A sign of the displeasure of the gods? The grotesque mascot of a city that is growing too fast and crumbling too soon? Or merely a monkey that has lost its way?