In everyday life food plays an important role. In one specific book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, food plays a very important role. This novel is a “Long Fiction” novel. Its main character, Sampath Chawla, lives a pretty normal life as a postal office worker, then one day that all changes. Sampath gets fired from his job and goes home and guess what? This is where our second instance of why food plays an important role in the book comes in to play. He goes home and is presented with a guava fruit by his mother because she thinks everything can be healed with food.
Food plays an important role in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard because it is very popular throughout the book and because a key character in the book has almost what people call an obsession with food. Kulfi starts us off early on this topic in the book from when she was drawing food all over the walls because she can’t get any food and she is begging the merchants for food, and the reason she is doing this is because she is pregnant with Sampath, who is born after Kulfi has run out of space to draw on the walls.
Then, when Sampath runs away and lives in the guava tree Kulfi is the only one who cooks for him and doesn’t allow anyone else to eat her food, so therefore it is thought of as sacred food. “... as Kulfi became more and more ambitious, more and more sure of what she was doing, just one whiff was enough to send [the family] wild. ” (103) Another instance would be with Sampath and the Monkeys.
Sampath often uses food in his explanations when giving advice to his followers from up in his tree; "Once you open a bottle of soda water, you should drink it before it goes flat. " (121) Also Sampath often dreamed about exquisite foods and exotic dishes during when he worked in the postal office. The Monkeys drink a lot of alcohol and soon make a big hullaballo in the guava orchard, they are almost little followers of Sampath. "Don't touch the monkeys," Mr. Chawla yelled, waving his arms, trying to snatch slingshots from the hands of the devotees.
"They are dangerous. In this state, they will turn on you. " (130) In conclusion, food plays a very important role in Hullabalo in the Guava Orchard because Kulfi is addicted to food and tries to fix everything with food, Sampath creates little miniature stories with food being characters in them and he is also served food that no-one else is allowed to eat, and last but not least, the Monkeys consume alcohol and create udder havoc all around Shahkot and in the Guava Orchard.
