Although the book cover boasts only the title and the name of the writer, the world that births it is often forgotten, and in The Time of t...
Although the book cover boasts only the title and the name of the writer, the world that births it is often forgotten, and in The Time of the Peacock, the reader gets a ticket to that world – of publishing. It harbours people who, like the peacock, strut with arrogance, vanity and boastfulness. The characters in this novel can be labelled “writer”, “editor” or “translator”, but the multiple points of view from which Siddharth Chowdhury writes would make them pointless. Instead, you see how the peacocks are much more than their vanity: they are the profession.
Janmejay “John” Nair, managing editor at Peacock India, drives around in a Delhi he’s familiar with, and yet he observes it like a flaneur bound to a car seat. He’s a Malayali married to a Kashmiri who thinks he has “no understanding of caste,”. Rifat Pandita-Nair isn’t wrong about this.
You’d expect an editor to reread his tweets before he posts them, but as a reply correcting his spelling of “gau”, which he spelt “g-a-y”, suggests, John will save his “decrepit ass” and “use TopGear” anyway. Chowdhury hits a nerve with this incident of performative activism gone wrong, as John helps out a family – comprising a henpecked husband, Hindu...
