Nuns, Jesuits, red meat, and an Indian Catholic minority feature in this novel, set almost entirely in Mangalore, and these are combined with Indian cuisine and childhood emotions such as motherlove, fear of abandonment, curiosity, and desire. So do puberty, adolescence, and the awakening of a repressed mind, clamoring for justice and truth. The result is a blend of Angela’s Ashes, Catcher in the Rye, and Portnoy’s Complaint.

At 72,000 words (around 260 pages) a complete novel in itself, One Little Indian is a reworking of the childhood, coming of age first 60 percent of The Revised Kama Sutra (which, according to some of its readers, is two novels in one), and it includes additional, never-published chapters that had been left out of “The Revised Kama Sutra” because of space constraints. The book ends with Vijay Prabhu graduating from college. The later chapters of The Revised Kama Sutra, focusing on Vijay Prabhu’s adult life, and which have a much higher sexual content, have been omitted from this novel, which may, therefore, make it accessible to a larger audience of both men and women who are reasonably cosmopolitan and well-read.

“A surprisingly delightful novel by a genuinely irreverent Indian from Mangalore. Crasta’s raunchiness is a mix of Khushwant Singh and Laurence Sterne. The unstoppably copious funniness is Shandian.” – The Telegraph, Indian newspaper

“A superb Mangalore-centric novel” — DP Satish, News18 Blog

“An achingly beautiful book on the inner world pathos and outer world absurdity of growing up – both inner and outer, sometimes outrageously funny. It applies to all humans anywhere, since we all grow up, but is set in India in the late 1950s and 60s. What really makes this a work of genius for me is not only the way it recaptures growing up, but the pictures it paints of India on virtually every page. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case I prefer the words. I feel like I have been to the Mangalore and visited the Calcutta of half a century ago, and experienced the world as Indians then experienced it.” – Mark David Ledbetter, Author