The story is set in Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi, the seat of the erstwhile Mughal empire. A once-tree-lined street with a canal flowing down its middle that led to the Emperor’s Red Fort, it is today a bustling place of commerce, the canal paved over. The trade is dominated by Hindus and amidst the congested alleys, spilling-onto-the pavement stores, yelling hawkers, routinely pop up fading Mughal monuments. Muslims decry the loss of Mughal splendour, Hindus feel proud to have covered the blemish over with the plaster of commerce. Into this setting is cast Suleiman Bhai, a Bangladeshi refugee masquerading as a descendant of Indian Mughals, his eye on a Parliament seat via the vote bank of Bangla migrants of a slum colony within Chandni Chowk area. Sohan Lal, a prosperous Hindu trader and a member of the fundamentalist Hindu party IPP is also angling for an election win. Gopal Pandey, the hapless tea seller, sits in a flimsy structure atop a drain opposite Sohan Lal’s shop and serves tea to his customers.

When anti-reservation protests break out in the capital, the IPP, a party of middle-class traders, decides to wrest initiative by staging a self-immolation. Gopal Pandey’s errant young son, under the influence of opium, takes centre stage in a rally and sets himself alight. As he flails, waiting for the promised blanket to be thrown over him, his dazed father, his eyesight perennially foggy because of numerous scratches on his spectacles, watches from the opposite side where he has been huddled by Suleiman’s man to shout in favour of the reservation. “These rallies are like Muharram…only you cry and you get twenty-five rupees for it.” Meanwhile, the God-fearing Sohan Lal has rid himself of any guilt having earlier sounded out Gopal that rallies were no good for boys. “It was up to the chaiwala to take the hint. No one can help a fool.”

India’s iconic cartoonist R. K. Laxman created a figure called the “common man”. In most cartoon strips he can be seen, dhoti-clad, hair sticking out, a bemused expression on his face as he observes the shenanigans of Indian society from the sideline. Saraf’s Gopal Pandey is Laxman’s “common man” brought to life. Perennially perplexed, the simpleton gets tossed as a pawn between the rival Hindu-Muslim factions of Chandni Chowk as each claws its way to the prestige, power and pelf of Indian parliament, a present-day avatar of the Peacock throne, the jewel-studded seat of emperor Shah Jahan. In a wonderfully farcical tale of democratic politics, Pandey, the common man, gets catapulted to inches of the pinnacle of power.

Each faction is supported by a coterie of memorable characters: yellow-toothed spin meister Ibrahim, one-armed Gauhar who is leader of a gang of thieving street urchins, spare and slick Ramvilas Babu who courts prostitutes and IPP politicians with equal élan, sari-clad Gita didi, the prostitute who has cast herself as a social worker, and the quartet of doddering Hindu traders, each waiting for the other to pop off and vacate his Chandni Chawk municipal seat.

Despite his stargazing occupation, Saraf keeps his feet on the ground in this relentless portrayal of the corruption of modern India. He throws up a posse of characters, divided by religion, caste, class, gender, yet united by self-aggrandizement. Even Chitra, the idealist social worker of her youth, in her race to journalistic eminence extrudes Gopal Pandey in her stories into a character that will sell with foreign audiences. The tale would have been bleak but for its rollicking irony and the occasional laugh-out-loud humour. The narrative suffers from some repetition, perhaps in its quest to be an epic. But Saraf’s tingling concoction would sober down reporters who routinely get orgiastic over the emerging economic power of India.