A fiction debut which has been likened to the work of Salman Rushdie and Italo Calvino, in its comic exuberance and playful imagination. Welcome proof that India's encounter with to new children, endowed with lavish gifts Salman Rushdie - who included this in his Vintage Book Of Indian Writing. After years of failure at school and work, and of spending his days dreaming in the tea stalls and singing to himself in the public gardens, it doesn't seem as if post-office clerk Sampath Chawla is going to amount to much. But then he climbs a guava tree and becomes unexpectedly famous as a guru.