An adolescent growing into a young man, preoccupied head to toe — and all parts between — with sex, searching for that elusive romantic love and the American dream against the backdrop of a sexually repressed society of small-town India in the 1960s.

Has Richard Crasta’s India changed in the 17 years since his The Revised Kama Sutra was first published in 1993? To a great extent — yes, to an even larger — no.
The Internet may have made it easier to find answers today to all those questions that preoccupy the teenager than it was for Crasta’s protagonist Vijay Prabhu as he searched through dictionaries, biology textbooks and how-to guides in his efforts to come of age.
For most middle-class Indians, then and now, and specially those with teenaged children, the Kama Sutra is not a book exhibited on a drawing room shelf if it is owned at all.
But the search for sex, the huge frustrations accompanying that search, the total self-preoccupation of youth and gradual maturity of a sort is not all that Crasta’s book is about. It is also about the universally difficult relationship between father and son, the tenderness with an oedipal tinge for a mother, the longing for success — of course with the principle aim of winning the girls. And it is about the ties with Maya, who pops up every now and then as a siren, a muse of sorts, a soulmate who opens doors of possibility, closes them too — illusion or maya, as you will.
The storyline is deceptively simple — it traces the journey of a young boy through adolescence to manhood chasing dreams of sex and becoming a writer. Vijay Prabhu’s roots are in a middle-class Christian family in Mangalore. His parents are not well off and Vijay passes through several Jesuit boarding schools and manages to survive what he calls the five pillars of oppression — bells, canes, penis shame, girl shame and sports.
The constant search for sex or at least some sexual knowledge and the American dream — where women are blonde and sexually ravenous, where food is sumptuous, e.g. Campbell’s chicken soup — a free world constructed from music (Elvis Presley and Cliff Richards), magazines, comic books and movies beguiles the child. (Still does, just a slightly different construct and throw in lots of dollars.)
Not much of a sportsman, frustrated Vijay finally finds his strength in words, gets academic recognition and makes it through a banking exam much to the surprise of his father who, as is wont with many a father cutting across class divides, thinks his son is good for nothing.
After a short stint with the bank, which includes some wonderful vignettes in Delhi, Kolkata and a string of small towns like Lucknow, Bhubaneshwar and Shillong, Vijay gets through the IAS and suddenly finds he has power — he is part of the “most elite by-merit-only class in India...” Crasta is at his scathingly humorous best in this section.
Vijay encounters power not just in some remote district in south India, but at home in Mangalore where he is treated with sudden respect and status conscious community members who never even nodded a greeting now visit his home as he overnight turns into a prize catch in the marriage market.
Crasta is a fine writer specially when writing of the small townness of 1960s Mangalore, the poor Christian middle class family which struggles with issues ranging from a colonial hangover, so-called Indian values and sets a high premium on “what will they say!”
Vijay soon recognises that this circumscribed world is not where he wants to be even with its privileges. He drops the IAS job and flies to the United States chasing the American dream, which soon sours. America turns out to be not quite a land of milk and honey but a bizarre country. “A land of gum-chewers, lukewarm hot dogs, women who flaunt their chemically-deodorized privates right under your nose but give you nothing, not even a flicker of recognition”.
A more matured Vijay returns home — to Mangalore and India, the growing up evident in the rather moving way he now views his parents: “I was shocked to see what the intervening years had done to them, I felt rising within me that protective urge one feels towards ageing parents, whose preservation suddenly becomes important to you as the preservation of old photographs, of family heirlooms, of your own precious organs”.
Vijay dabbles around, here and there, a bit of the spiritual claptrap thrown in as he soul searches in Pondicherry, meets Maya again and finally returns to the US with a manuscript in his bag, a less “illusioned” young man but still dreaming… creating those erotic fantasies, bordering on the comic, the implausible, that help boys stay sane and men with mundane lives get by.
The Revised Kama Sutra is flippant, witty, bittersweet. I can’t quite decide if the occasional over-the-top prose embellishes the raunchy frustration of the young Vijay or just stretches things a bit too far like the talkative youngster who fascinates to begin with till you find you’ve switched off. Perhaps those stretches don’t work for me but would for others — figure for yourself.

Sunrita Sen is a freelance journalist. She can be contacted at sunrita@gmail.com