Assuming, perhaps, that his bizarre title might lead prospective readers to expect a plot along the lines of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, K Raghavendra Rao explains that The Cockroach Man is based, metaphorically, on “the stubborn undying survival instinct of a cockroach,” and not on “any mysterious transformation of a man into a cockroach or the reverse.”

The Cockroach Man traces the adventures of Krishna, who regards his face as, “perhaps the ugliest” he “has ever encountered”, in contrast to that of his beautiful mother. Ancestry plays a vital role in this saga, and characters come alive in the manner of Dickens, whom the protagonist of this fictionalised autobiography— “a literary animal”— “devoured greedily and hungrily.”

Thus, Krishna’s great grandfather is “a tall and hefty fellow, his body carved out of black stone, blacker than an amavasya night. He sported a moustache which flaunted his masculinity with unmistakable aggression...” etc.
In this description of four sisters, simile and metaphor combine in provocative images: “They set afire our street as they flaunted their milk-white bodies, their sarees ballooning in the air, their rich black hair dancing in the breeze, their breasts bouncing like tennis balls, their eyes turbulent like the sea on a full moon...”

Krishna feels strongly drawn to one of the girls and, some passionate prose notwithstanding, he apologises for his “utter incompetence” to convey the “the thrill and joy” of his fantasies. His explicit accounts of sexual escapades, real and imagined, are in keeping with the ‘Bildungsroman’ genre to which The Cockroach Man adheres.

The development of the narrator is related in self-deprecatory style. There is humour, both at his own expense and that of those he meets in his arduous ascent to adulthood. Particularly amusing is the Muthurangan episode. In “an epic effort,” Krishna reviews the fawning bus conductor’s (shades of Uriah Heep!) magnum opus, an ‘English Ramayanam’.

The following is an example of the poet’s “single-minded” determination to rhyme, regardful of reason: “Ravana the demon supreme roared/ But it was Rama who really scored.” No condescension here. The writer himself is conscious of “a genuine linguistic predicament” when it comes to writing, in the words of the sub-title of The Cockroach Man, an “English Version Of An Unwritten But Not Unspoken Novella In My Native Tongue Kannada.”
Apparently only his, “authorial and umbilical attachment to the text” prevented K R R from consigning the book “to the dustbin of history.” We must be glad of that attachment!

A Review of K Raghavendra Rao’s The Cockroach Man