3 Review(s)

Soliloquy of a Small-town Uncivil Servant is an attempt at a memoir that begins with the realization that the narrator has forgotten much of his past. Hence, the acute need to retrieve it. What comes to light is an arduous journey into his past—the circumstances of his birth, his growing up in a small city like Gorakhpur and his rendezvous with life outside of that inhibited milieu as he joins the civil services and moves to other places. Fact and fantasy meld as he recreates his experiences with bureaucracy and bureaucrats—his perception of them and theirs of him as an ‘outsider’—and recounts his many associations with men, women, his teachers and even strangers.