MIKE STOCKS’S DEBUT literary novel is a warm-hearted comedy set among the churning colours and clamouring crowds of a fictional southern Indian town, Mullaipuram. Sub-Inspector (retired) R. M. Swaminathan (Swami to his friends) subsists on a meagre disability pension. He faces the debilitating after-effects of a stroke, the burden of finding dowries for six daughters and a sense of self-esteem evaporating in the intensity of a tropical hot season. These, however, are merely the starting blocks for Swami’s trials.

At the very moment that his wife begins to negotiate a favourable match for their eldest, and for the most arbitrary and convoluted reason, a white man plunges from the sky and expires in the shadow of his wheelchair. An inauspicious harbinger for nuptials this may be, but it is also the first wild tangent of a zig-zagging road that will lead Swami through mortal peril, humiliation and veneration.

The narrator, our anonymous guide on this journey, has access to the psyches of all the characters. The narration examines their thoughts, seasoning information with wryly implicit comment. Occasionally it is tinged with a pomposity that increases our appreciation of Swami’s silence, at other times it steps back and lets humour flow from the well-drawn characters’ conversation.

Stocks’s poetic background (his first collection is forthcoming) manifests itself in beautiful turns of phrase — the “heft and texture” of a realised truth — and in the interweaving of Indian English throughout the text. There is a vogue in contemporary fiction for leaping between characters and timeframes like a flea seeking a tasty host. White Man Falling is a reminder that a single location and perspective, and linear chronology, can be deeply satisfying.

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