The character appears in only two scenes and has no dialogue. I also really enjoyed the deep exploration into the origins of stories, tall tales, and myths - that Vavachan's story started as that of a normal little boy, but as time went on and his moustache grew and gained notoriety, the person who was Vavachan fell away in the stories and only Moustache was left, with Vavachan and his simple quests (to find Seetha and to reach Malaya) falling to the wayside in people's minds as the stories became bigger than the man they were about.Vavachan is a Pulayan who gets the opportunity to play a policeman with an immense moustache in a musical drama.
These embellishments really added to the portrait of India and people from a variety of castes across the timeline of the story (mostly set around WWI). It was less about the story of Vavachan/Moustache, and more about the people and world around him, going on long tangents about individual characters which intersected with each other and Moustache over the course of the story. It wasn't until the end of the book when this is addressed at all, and even then it fell flat to combat the widespread sexism throughout the book.Īside from the sexism throughout the narrative, there were things that I enjoyed about the book. I cannot think of a situation in which I would tell a young child a story in which every single woman is raped or murdered, and where no one takes any particular issue with it. But this is a story-in-a-story, and the narrator is a modern-day father telling it to his five year old son. If it was solely historical fiction, an argument could be made that those were the attitudes of the time.
I find this particularly troubling given the framing of the story. Nearly any mention of a woman was accompanied with a detailed description of her breasts. There wasn’t a male character in the book that had any sort of meaningful interaction with a woman - they universally viewed the women around them as sex objects, deceivers, and seductresses.
The female characters in the book rarely have any sort of developed personality, and most (all?) of them faced one or both of two ends: rape or murder. In the preface of the book, the author mentions that some people might find it to be “anti-women”.
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