My buddy Amit Varma’s new novel My Friend Sancho pursues the market uncovered by the success of Chetan Bhagat, readers who are members of the English-speaking Indian middle class. Numerous others are chasing the same market; Keep Off the Grass seems to have baldly copied the formula, changing IITs to IIMs, while Bhagat himself rehashed it with call centers in his second book.

An Amitav Ghosh reader won’t read Chetan Bhagat; and vice versa. I’d like my work to appeal to both kinds of readers…. writers like Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki Murakami and Yoko Ogawa are both critically acclaimed as well as wildly popular. There aren’t any writers like that in India writing in English… [FAQ]

The good news is that Sancho, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Asian prize, is a quick, engaging read. It tackles the same market as Bhagat without descending to his writing level. It’s never unintelligent; it touches upon class, communalism, corruption, encounter shootings and the role of the press while staying at its core a love story. Like many post-liberalization books and movies, it brandishes certain totems of New India: broadband, Subway sandwiches, fancy malls, Café Coffee Day.

Unlike much South Asian lit packaged for the West, the references are determinedly Indian. Actors are name-checked with domestic precision, and there’s no mango-mehndi-koyal exoticization. There’s just a straightforward story: Abir the journalist, Muneeza the girl he’s fallen in love with, and the multiple sides of an encounter killing in Bombay.

I snarfed this book down in two gulps. It felt intimate, as if Varma were perched on my shoulder narrating like the talking lizard in his story. It’s got the same settings: Eterniti mall standing in for Infiniti in Andheri. The food court where we whiled away Sundays with deliciously greasy dosas. The Bookends (Landmark) bookstore with a tremendous selection. That adorkable, geeky, absurdist sense of humor. The relentless pimping of his blog. It’s hard out here for a blogger

Varma doesn’t take sides in the book’s central incident, a mistaken police encounter. He humanizes the policeman, who’s but a tendril of a system corrupt all the way to Delhi, and the discussion of systemic rot is fairly nuanced.

What isn’t nuanced here is why Abir ever falls for the girl. She’s an opaque screen upon which the reporter and his restless phallus can project his romantic fantasies. To be fair, this isn’t an uncommon issue. Bollywood’s treatment of romance is usually underdeveloped, as are Hollywood movies pitched to teens (Stardust). I also had a hard time caring about the work struggles of a journalist. They’re far too similar to blogger’s block. Tell me more about the policeman — now there’s a life I know little about.

Sancho was featured in the Business Standard, which didn’t seem entirely comfortable with mass market fiction. I’ll say the same: it’s not Rushdie, but I quite liked it, and Varma’s already working on book number two:

My protagonist in this one is an IAS officer in his late 40s, an ’80’s man forced to come to terms, by a series of circumstances, with the 21st century. It’s a bigger and more ambitious book… [Mid-Day]

Related posts: Hachette job, Sacred frame, Un-Sewri tales, Raas Leela, Dining with insurgents, Varma wins Bastiat, Kidrobot, and other scary tales (updated), A man, a plan, a candlestick: Varma, 1 across: Bookstore chain