Book Review: Call Me Dan

Thirty-year-old Gautam Joshi is from a middle-class Mumbai family. He enjoys his job at a call centre, even though his parents are convinced that the sector is going to implode any day and leave their son unemployed. Enter the blonde American colleague, Sondra, whom Gautam befriends. Soon, he is willing to risk losing all of his security nets, like his long-time girlfriend Michelle, in order to be “Call me Dan” Daniel who hits on a blonde babe, stays out all night, and holidays in Goa. Call Me Dan isn’t really about the evil that is call centre culture or any existentialist angst. It’s a fun and sensitive look at people from the great Indian middle class who are neither slumdogs nor millionaires and who want more.

The spotlights in Call Me Dan are on Gautam and Michelle, his girlfriend, who wants marriage because they’ve been dating four years. Gautam hasn’t a clue what he wants but the idea of adding a wife, that too a Catholic one, into the tiny apartment that houses his uber-traditional family gives him the heebie-jeebies. While the two of them may be confused about their desires, neither suffers any identity crises. They are well-ensconced in their worlds and grounded thanks to the habits and rituals that make up their life in Mumbai: the chai at the train station, the comfortable darkness of The Ghetto, the weird way in which this city tends to throw at you only those out of its 16 million residents with whom you have less than six degrees of separation. By the end, Gautam isn’t much clearer about what he wants, but he’s grown out of some adolescent notions. Plus, he has his own 2BHK in south Mumbai. We’re envious.

Although the characters ramble without direction, the story doesn’t and every episode adds to the tension of whether Michelle is going to figure out what Gautam’s doing or if Gautam will pull the plug on his Daniel activities in time. Trivedi’s language is crisp and fluent. There are a few clichés, like Gautam’s parents, but Trivedi negotiates the predictable elements cleverly so that the reader’s attention isn’t lost. The most fun is to be had in the conversations. Trivedi’s characters say the usual banal things but along with each dialogue is a translation of the actual meaning behind each sentence spoken. It’s not stream of narrative as much as a mental voiceover and often, it’s likely to bring forth the giggles.

Not everything is funny—try not going “Awww” when Gautam tells Michelle why he calls himself Dan—but Trivedi doesn’t linger upon anything, thankfully choosing to focus on pace and storytelling rather than literary flourish. Unpretentious and unburdened by any ambitions of being a social document, Call Me Dan tells a simple story and tells it well. It’s the perfect book to take with you on your daily commute or when on a long flight. Chetan Bhagat, watch out.

Call Me Dan, Anish Trivedi, Penguin, Rs250. Buy Call Me Dan from Flipkart.com.

Deepanjana Pal is a journalist and the author of The Painter: A Life of Ravi Varma. She is currently developing a keen appreciation for lazy brunches and coffee breaks in Bandra while working on her freelance assignments.