Perineum: Ambarish Satwik

How would your biography read if it were written by your spouse? Or by your closest friend? Imagine how different it would have been if it had been written by, take your pick, your barber, your dentist, your beautician, your gym instructor, or your music instructor. Now what if your sessions with the surgeon who worked on your nether region were chronicled by the surgeon? That is what Ambarish Satwik attempts in Perineum, in a fictional sense.

Apart from rhyming with Imperium, I could make precious little of what Perineum meant when I first heard of the book. Answers.com defined it for me:

Perineum (n) 1. The portion of the body in the pelvis occupied by urogenital passages and the rectum, bounded in front by the pubic arch, in the back by the coccyx, and laterally by part of the hipbone. 2. The region between the scrotum and the anus in males, and between the posterior vulva junction and the anus in females.

The sub-title of the book, Nether Parts of the Empire, er, revealed a bit more.

So there you are, Perineum looks at the usually covered part of the bodies of some of the key people who were part of colonial India. It is a collection of thirteen stories, each examining a fictionalized mal-function in the generally-covered region of the body of one notable character in the British Empire in India. Covering famous characters like Robert Clive, King George V, Vinayak Savarkar, and M A Jinnah (and a few others), with a nod to Mahatma Gandhi, Perineum is expectedly irreverent and decidedly funny.

Experimentation with form, structure, narrative, and plot themes has been quite in vogue in writing, more so in recent times as people from different professions have been lured by ink. First time author Ambarish Satwik, (surprise, surprise, he is a surgeon by profession) has taken it to a different level with Perineum. And he succeeds. The language is also light and period-appropriate, so that accentuates the humor and the authenticity of the narrative.

A big temptation in an approach like this would have been to go into the erotic and sensual, and mix the scatological with it, but the author does well to eschew that and keep his focus clear. The absence of word-play is another significant characteristic of the book – thus making it read almost like a formal report, enhancing the humor even more.

Of course, the book sends you off more than once to Gray’s Anatomy (or an equivalent guide) to figure out the meaning of words and expressions. But the images are useful and help enhance one’s understanding.