Weight Loss (novel)

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Title Weight Loss
Author Upamanyu Chatterjee
Cover artist Sarnath Banerjee
Country India
Language English
Genre(s) Black comedy, Novel
Publisher Penguin Books
Released February 28, 2006
Pages 432 pp
ISBN ISBN 0-670-05862-9
Preceded by The Mammaries of the Welfare State

Weight Loss is a 2006 novel by Upamanyu Chatterjee.

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Weight Loss is about the strange life (from age 11 to age 37) of a sexual deviant named Bhola, whose attitude to most of the people around him depends on their lust worthiness. Bhola’s tastes are not, to put it mildly, conventional. Sex is a form of depravity for him and he has fetishes about everyone from teachers to roadside sadhus to servants; he progresses from fantasizing about the portly family cook Gopinath to falling “madly in love” with a vegetable-vendor and her husband. This last obsession spans the entire length of the book and most of Bhola’s life – he even ends up studying at a college in an obscure hill-station hundreds of miles from his home because he wants to be near the couple. At various other stages in his life he get expelled from school for defecating in a teacher’s office, participates in an inexpertly carried out circumcision (one of the book’s many manifestations of the “weight loss” motif) and engages in all forms of debauchery.