One and Three Quarters

A STINGING COMMENTARY ON THE MORAL DECREPITUDE THAT AILS POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA.

Young Pitambar is known in the village as ‘Langdya’ because one of his legs is shorter than the other and, as a result, he walks with a pronounced limp. Pitambar goes to a school with no resources for lack of government funds. While his heart is not in studies, his eyes are on the Maths teacher Gengage’s wife. Pitambar is looking for a formula to get rich without a school or college degree, and one day he lands it. Uncovering an affair between the school principal Dhamale and the music teacher Alaknanda Deshpande, he begins to blackmail them in order to pass school with flying colours. While this happens, Langdya is befriended by a tomcat called Latthya, and to his utter surprise, he discovers that he understands the language of cats.

The MLA of the town is looking for a henchman exactly of Langdya’s character. With the help of Latthya, the fat tom-cat, Langdya wins the confidence of the MLA. Once he gains entry into the state-level political circles, he becomes his own guru, observing the hypocrisy and abject corruption that plagues the fields of literature, music, cinema, journalism and social work. He figures out the structure of the bazaar that the Mantralaya (Secretariat) is. He develops contacts with journalist who are more like touts and pimps and less like scribes. He procures a cabin for Pandurang in the Ministry of Culture in the Mantralaya. All this happens while Latthya the tomcat propels Langdya to complete moral dissolution.

In the brilliant, magical realist satire, Shrikant Bojewar gives a stinging commentary on the moral decrepitude that ails post-Independence India through the conversations between Langdya and Latthya and between Latthya and the other cats in Langdya Pitambar’s village.