'Love Guru of Devgarh' book review: The pleasures of a plain tale

Indian writing in English continues to produce fine novels, but its short fiction has lately seemed to lose some of its old vitality. For decades, R. K. Narayan, Khushwant Singh and Ruskin Bond kept the tradition alive with stories that remain read, remembered and loved. Today, few writers appear to carry that inheritance forward.

Much contemporary short fiction has drifted away from the pleasures of storytelling, offering instead what often read like mood pieces or thinly disguised essays. Aditya Sharma’s Love Guru of Devgarh, a collection of twelve stories, is a welcome exception. It returns, confidently and unapologetically, to the old-school art of the tale.

Set in Devgarh, a fictional small town in North India, these stories are suffused with warmth, nostalgia, humour and suspense. The setting inevitably invites comparison with Malgudi, Narayan’s immortal fictional town, but the similarity ends there. Sharma has a voice and narrative manner entirely his own, and its charm lies in its simplicity. Yet beneath that plainness he dissects layered characters caught in dilemmas peculiar to small-town India: ambition and obligation, loneliness and companionship, respectability and desire.

The collection’s appeal rests largely on the suspense Sharma builds without sensationalism, crime or sleaze. He avoids linguistic pyrotechnics and concentrates on the essential business of fiction—telling stories well. His earthy humour, never forced, repeatedly brings a smile.
The opening story, “Double Role”, introduces a young medical representative from a lower-middle-class family who, pressed by circumstance, drives his father’s auto-rickshaw before office hours. The arrangement leads him into a series of awkward encounters, most memorably when he finds himself ferrying his own colleague. In “Love Guru”, a young government doctor doubles as a relationship adviser to his friends; his overconfidence, colliding with a comedy of errors, brings about his downfall.

“The Tipsy Guard” captures the solitude of a goods-train guard’s life with unusual tenderness. Travelling with him through the night, the reader can almost feel the bitter cold of his compartment. His fondness for drink, Punjabi songs and dancing reveals a quirky, fun-loving man beneath the loneliness.

Elsewhere, Sharma quietly overturns familiar stereotypes. “Trailing the Cop” presents a kind-hearted policeman far removed from the bullying figure of popular imagination. “Please Forgive Me” follows a young lawyer’s efforts to pacify his wife after a lapse on his part; what begins as an attempt to restore domestic harmony takes an unexpected turn. In “A Stroll to Remember”, a retired railway police officer’s routine visit to the station becomes an unexpectedly dangerous episode.

Through these twelve stories, Sharma explores the drama, humour and pathos of everyday life in small-town India. His particular gift is the ability to find the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary—to recognise that a train compartment, an auto-rickshaw, a marital quarrel or a station platform can hold an entire world. Love Guru of Devgarh is a charming, humane collection, and a reminder that the short story, at its best, remains one of Indian writing in English’s most durable forms.

Title: Love Guru of Devgarh
Author: Aditya Sharma
Publisher: Copper Coin
Pages: 184
Price: ₹450