Wealth

Besides being about domestic relations, Vivek Shanbhag’s novella Ghachar Ghochar focuses on the acquisition of wealth, how monetary collection can change people for the worse, especially their moral foundations. This work acts as a parable at times, in that the reader can imagine what happens to the narrator to be a universal condition. This is made possible by the narrator’s status of an Everyman. Those who stand to monetarily inherit tend to feel a sense of entitlement about this promise of wealth, and the narrator (acting as an Everyman) holds this belief, that he deserves his family’s wealth. He considers the possibility of losing this inheritance to charity as a waste and crazy idea. This demonstrates money’s power over the narrator; he finds identity in his family’s wealth.

The parable nature of Ghachar Ghochar mimics that of The Pearl by John...