The Fourth Monkey
(a comic, erotic and 'sophic tale)

Sushil Gupta

What's it about?

• Madan Swaroop, a professor of English literature in his fifties, recalls 25 years of his married life on his flight to Kanglung, Bhutan, on a teaching tenure.
   

• His beautiful wife is an ardent Krishna devotee a la Mira Bai. She restricts marital sex to once a week, which leads to conflict and comedy.
   

• A vivid description of the college campus and the Bhutanese way of life follows.
   

• He gets involved with two of his students…
   

• There are parallel dialogues between the wife and her god and between the husband and his organ. Shades of Calvin and Hobbes!
   

• The imagery of cricket for sex creates its own humour.
   

• In the midst of human characters, a god's shadowy presence looms over the happenings.
   

• A Joycean epiphany at the end caps it all.

About the Author

Comments:
 
Outrageously funny, serious, gripping, Sushil Gupta’s The Fourth Monkey is one of the most refreshing novels I have read in a long, long time. Shelly (short for Shalini), the Simla born protagonist’s beautiful but semi-ascetic wife – and thus an expression of the novel’s title denoting the suppression of genitalic indulgence – is a contrast to her Delhi based college lecturer husband, a normal healthy male with a strong and insatiable sexual appetite. The collision between the opposing temperaments of Shelly and Madan is the nucleus of the book, giving rise to hilarious dialogues and delightfully comic situations while, at the same time, probing deep into the complexities that constitute human behaviour, the rich diversity that makes homo sapiens so fascinating (and baffling) a species of creation.
     Besides being a psycho-biological exploration of the male and female psyches in sophisticated settings like Delhi and Simla, the latter half of the novel whose setting now shifts to Bhutan, gives us a vivid and perennially engaging picture of college life in that mountainous region, a sexually liberated and non-hypocritical outpost of the mainland, culturally different and supposedly ‘backward’ compared to the urban centres of India, yet in many ways a kind of distorting mirror reflection of what we in India – or anywhere else in the world for that matter – are in actuality beneath the surface of our public ‘correctness’.
     Stylistically, The Fourth Monkey is wonderfully entertaining. Replete with innuendo, irony, and the joi de vivre of life, it employs the metaphor of cricket – to cite just one example – to illuminate sexual success, or failure, to attempt to bowl a maiden over being the ambition of every hot-blooded male. Poking good-natured fun at the duplicities of politics and religion, at the same time these spheres of human activity are never ridiculed, for their genuine sides can be ameliorative and uplifting, respectively.
     It has been remarked that the aim of any writer is, first of all, to make the reader turn the page. The author’s success in this endeavour is unexceptionable. And for Dr Johnson the successful writer is one who holds the reader ‘in pleasing captivity’. Reading The Fourth Monkey, I found myself held in that happy embrace from the first page to the last.
     The clever, witty, and unexpected ending is a brilliant and ingenious encapsulation of the novel’s theme whereby the two main characters, the passionate though now ageing husband and his renunciatory though still physically attractive wife, fulfil their divergent destinies to their own respective satisfactions – and, surprisingly, to that of the reader as well. We wish them well in their future amatory and spiritual excursions!
     More than this does not need to be said, lest the reader’s surprise be anticipated. A good novel is its own best recommendation, and should be allowed to speak for itself.

R.W.Desai
Retd Professor of English 
University of Delhi
 

Comments on The Fourth Monkey:

The Little Magazine

“Look, don’t play cricket in Bhutan. If you must, play by yourself, and that too, not often,” with these bon mots the wife packs off her husband: 55 and not quite a cricketing legend, for a teaching assignment in Bhutan. This is also the opening (and closing) line of the novel and it works like an adman’s ruse.

     The story is simple. So much so that you are gripped by déjà vu as if you’ve discovered a relative’s diary. But in the larger turn of pages, it is also the story of middle class India, trapped as it has been, since independence or perhaps earlier, in a middle-class muddle. A twilight zone whose semi-dark or partly-lit landscape the author explores with the passion and precision of an embedded voyeur. Like a modern-day Vatsyayan trying to write down his dictionary of erotic experience. In the attempt the author manages to sandpaper many layers off the Indian ‘muddle class’ good-family veneer. What emerges is a family that is good and respectable on the outside but whose togetherness is fraught by a hundred ‘tensions’. These are the good family concerns of millions of those who grew up in the years around Independence. People who had to live many different lives. And be good at it.

     The book, written in the first person, is animated with a rare mischievousness. Madan Swaroop, a college lecturer, is at pains to explain to his god-loving wife that his ‘little master’ – or ‘Sunny’ as he likes to call his organ – has had enough of “domestic cricket” and would like to go for the real thing, as often and as many times as a newly-married man should. But the wife, Shelly, an “extremist of moderation” and a devotee of Krishna, rubbishes the idea that a weekly dose of sex is more than enough.

     Krishna is in her life more than just a propitiatory figure. He is also her divine lover who in times of distress and confusion shows her the way. Like when he tells her to say ‘yes’ to Madan Swaroop’s marriage proposal and later when he asks her to keep the child she’s conceived after a night of ‘rubber-less’ sex. Apart from that pretty ordinary, everyday things happen to the couple. But as a good storyteller will always insist, they happen not in the way they do to other people. Here Gupta shows an eye for picking nuances of emotion and offering dramatic presentation in a calm fashion, reminiscent of Updike. Gupta, a first time author at 60, manages that without getting self-conscious. It helps that the story is autobiographical or as Gupta says in the foreword: “Everything in my novel is true, except the story”.

     What I also find interesting is the author’s questioning of a symbol that described for a long time how Indians looked at the rest of the world. With pronounced suspicion. While Mahatma Gandhi’s three monkeys – that heard, saw and spoke no evil – became the nation’s conscience-keepers, little thought went into the fact that the chosen animal was known to be rather fickle and difficult to discipline, given to bouts of copy-cat behaviour. Gupta’s ribbing takes the form of the book’s title, The Fourth Monkey, who with his hands on his genitals ‘does no evil’. Yet it is the one who by accident or design is conspicuous by its absence from the national trinity.

     The wife-loving husband and the god-loving wife live peacefully till there comes a time when he gets a teaching assignment in Bhutan. It is there that the teacher of English literature truly finds expression to both his thwarted Romanticism and his love for literary role-playing. Especially, when two of the most sought-after girls in his college begin to flirt with him. Some more of the usual and regular await the reader as the computer-addict son becomes an IT professional and leaves for the US.

Dhiraj Singh
The Little Magazine (Vol VII, Issue 1&2)

Bedroom Humour
(BOOK OF THE WEEK)
Life comes with its ups and downs. Here is a book
that unravels these undulations but in the bedroomof a middle-class man.

A 60-year-old first time author has delved into matters of the bedroom in his book, The Fourth Monkey. No prizes for guessing that it was only after compiling a few rejection slips that the book got published.

The Fourth Monkey is an unlikely title for a novel of this nature. But author Sushil Gupta has an explanation. The three Gandhian monkeys find recurrent mention in the book as the protagonist’s wife carries these with her to his home from her maternal home. The three monkeys – see no evil, hear no evil and talk no evil – are unacceptable to the protagonist, Madan Swaroop, as he feels that by ignoring the evil around one becomes a party to it. In his life, while these three monkeys do not exist, there is another (fourth) monkey that shares space on the same pedestal. Stuck in a marriage where the wife is like a 20th century reincarnation of Mira Bai, his bedroom is full of restrictions and resolutions accompanied by meditation, fasting and devotional sprees, giving birth to the fourth monkey that ‘does’ no evil and sits uptight hiding his genitals.

This first phase of his life ends as he goes to Bhutan as a lecturer. The description of college life in Bhutan is a little boring after the interesting and fast paced incidents that a reader is treated to in the beginning. Many more characters enter the scene, who are juggled well by the author. But two of his students, Sherry and Tashi, find maximum space from the second phase onwards into the third phase of his life. Misadventures follow that are spaced well with Madan Swaroop’s own inhibitions, problems and policies.  

The book though a no-no for children does provide a few laughs for adults and young adults. There are some tit-bits of knowledge too that are delivered with the right ingredients. A corrupt politician for a father and its disheartening discovery by the daughter and her means of redemption are touching and encouraging. The imaginary conversations between the protagonist and his organ as well as the references to cricket at crucial junctures are humorous. 

Aroma Sah
 The Statesman (20 Sept, 2007)

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