T’ta Professor

A thin, short man with illusions of grandeur, Khashtivallabh Pant, Dubbul MA, is a school teacher in a remote Kumaoni village, where he is mockingly referred to as T’ta Professor. A great admirer of the Englishman’s attire, T’ta is also deeply in awe of the white man’s language. He always carries a notebook to jot down English words that he hears for the first time, acknowledging a word as acceptable only after he has consulted his Oxford Dictionary. His vanity makes him a terrific target for lampooning and the narrator in this novel, a writer who never manages to finish the stories he sets out to write, is determined to produce a ‘biting satire’, and wastes no time finding out more about T’ta’s life.