Manohar Shyam Joshi may have been known to a larger world for Humlog and Buniyad, the popular TV serials he scripted, but he was a writer who depicted the foibles and pretensions of ordinary people and their societies with a wicked but not unforgiving pen.

T’Ta Professor is just such a work, using a pared down, precise prose to portray the life and social milieu of the pompous failure whom the novel is named after. Capturing individual behaviour in hilarious cameos, this novel overlays it with the tragedies of frustrated desires – sexual as well as professional – that are as much the result of inhibited character as of social and political fault-lines.

“Does this mean you have experienced certain base emotions from the time of your youth to now, sir?”

“No comments, Mr Joshi,” was the answer.

I decided to change tracks now. “Sir, even if I believe that you became Miss Yen’s self-appointed guardian to protect Yatish from her feminine wiles, what about all the other girls in Sunaulidhar? In fact, if I believe what you said about the effect of lust on old people, what about all the women in the village? Do you plan to become a guardian to all of them?”

“If there were any sexy sirens in the village, Mr Joshi, then would you come here for bird-watching, huh?” T’ta wiggled his eyebrows at me.

Published in Hindi in 1995. Translated into English by Ira Pande, published in 2008.