The Avatar

About the Book

The story is based on the alleged discovery of Elvis Presley's reincarnation in Mangalam, a small village set amidst the backwaters of the Malabar Coast in India. The subsequent events when an Elvis-mad matron from Memphis, Tennessee comes to claim the child as her very own make for a very hilarious reading. The events start unfolding when the astrologer called into cast the child's birth horoscope declares the child to be an avatar, a great reincarnation. Everybody assumes the reincarnation to be that of Lord Krishna, the deity worshipped in the village. But the two precocious daughters of Sunita, the neighbour and a distant relation of the child's parents, create, without meaning to, a feeling that the child is actually a reincarnation of Elvis Presley.

Neeli, the eldest of the two, editor of her college magazine and an aspiring journalist, manages to publish an article about the phenomenon in the "Memphis Tattler". Maggie Duckworth, a rich widow and fanatic in her devotion to Elvis, reads the article and lands in India to claim the child. She has Alonzo Bosworthy, a novice reporter from the tabloid, in tow to cover what she thinks will be a scoop. Besides, her ulterior motive is to chase out the present guardians of the Presley Foundation, with whom she had a long series of run-ins, and install the true heir to the throne of Graceland Mansions.

The Mangalam villagers meanwhile have come to very different conclusions about the impending visit of the Americans. The village barber, a fanatic Maoist, is convinced that the Americans are actually CIA agents coming to take over what he imagines to be the oil wealth hidden under the village. He organizes the farm workers to protest against the visit. Meanwhile, a defrocked priest and his small coterie of Christian followers in the village maintain that the child is actually the second Christ come to redeem the world, and maintain a vigil outside the reincarnation's house. They are there to prevent the child being spirited away to the West.

The barber's wild imagination had also infected the staid householders of the village and they want their cut of the oil wealth lying under their feet. Of course there is the village yokel suddenly transformed by a series of misunderstandings into a Greek scholar whose wild oratory is listened to by the villagers avidly but without understanding. By the time Maggie Duckworth arrives at the village she is met by all these forces, which she cannot fathom.

Things are not helped by the avaricious nature of the reincarnation's father, Mr. Keshavan, who dreams of inheriting Presley's Graceland on behalf of his son. As if these things were not enough for Maggie Duckworth, Bosworthy manages to get himself arrested as a spy with designs on India's cultural heritage when he wanders into the village temple. The story goes on to its ultimate denouement as the Indian papers, slow on the uptake, now create a country- wide furor making the incident take on an international flavour with formal protests being lodged with the American Ambassador in India and nearly bringing the Indian Government down for kowtowing to the Americans.

Sunita's two daughters though central to the theme are just onlookers and as bewildered as Maggie by the course of events they have unleashed. Babli, the younger one, is the agnostic with a healthy disrespect for the superstitions surrounding the village life. But she triggers off events leading to the acceptance of the child to be a reincarnation of Elvis.

About the Author

We carry in our names all the flotsam and jetsam of our tribe, our people, our history, our collective failures and our sorrows. Dimly perceived perhaps, but still it anchors us and imprisons us in ways not even the bars of a prison can do. So by choosing to write under the pen name of Ivar Tabrizi, I thought I would loosen the grip my world has on me, and explore with simple words, learnt in the teeming city of Calcutta, why we live such desperate lives and then die, leaving hardly a trace of ourselves except perhaps in the genes of our children.

Born in India as it was being partitioned in 1947, I grew up in Calcutta, a city of slums and old British buildings and known for its ardent love of the arts and literature. Perhaps the intellectual ferment that is Calcutta infected me. But it was a slow acting virus. I took my time to complete my studies in Chemical Engineering, to marry, to have two wonderful children, and to work in some of the most inhospitable places in the world.

By the time I crossed my fiftieth year, the urge to write made its mark and I wrote my first book, The Avatar. Though I work in Kuwait now, I plan to leave for a retired life of reminiscing and writing, perhaps in the foothills of Sikkim where I can pursue my interest in Tibetan Buddhism. I have two more books on the anvil, one about the genocide on a mythical island off Africa and the other about the life and times of the infamous coterie who ruled Iraq until a short while back.