It’s a brave step to have a coward as your protagonist but acclaimed author Vivek Shanbhag’s unlikeable creation proves to be a memorable device for exploring power, patriarchy and politics in contemporary India.

The lily-livered narrator, Venkat, lives in Bengaluru (Bangalore) with his increasingly resentful wife, Viji. After a promising start, the couple have arrived at middle age with their careers and marriage flatlining. Their lives are beige. The only spark, or occasional flashpoint, in their humdrum existence is their rebellious (in Venkat’s eyes) daughter, Rekha. Now aged 20 and an arts student, she is pursuing a liberal lifestyle and feminist politics, to which Venkat gives lip service but privately disagrees.

Imagine his suspicions when two of Rekha’s male college “friends”, trying to get in touch with her, turn up on his doorstep unannounced. Rekha is on holiday in Mavinamane, a remote village where Venkat’s family own a plantation. There’s no landline or mobile signal: she is uncontactable, he explains. The boys are easily dismissed. But when their “uncles” turn up shortly afterwards, Venkat realises he could be embroiled in a local vendetta.

The real trouble starts when Rekha goes missing and her parents decide to take the overnight bus to Mavinamane to find her. Back at the plantation, now run by Antanna, his sadistic, paternal uncle, Venkat discovers that the events he thought he’d buried in the past have reawakened.

At first, Venkat’s weakness is gently humorous and relatable. He is an archetypal grumpy, old man: he resents noisy groups of youth, their silly modern hairstyles and what passes for fashion, so different to his day. Unable to pilot his own life, he relies on self-help books to answer his everyday conundrums. One such piece of wisdom, that “there are no coincidences, only unseen chains of consequences,” begins the novel. Yet despite all the gurus’ advice, and all the chances he is given to rise to the challenge, Venkat fails every time, revealing himself to be a social-climbing hypocrite with zero moral fibre or courage.

A wannabee journalist, Rekha stands out in sharp contrast to her weaselly dad. She sticks to her principles and has a fearless drive to expose the corruption she sees around her. In this way she is similar to Venkat’s maternal uncle, Ramana, who is also central to Venkat’s secrets. When Venkat was a student, Ramana upset the authorities with his political activism and had to disappear. He sent letters home to the plantation, although they were indecipherable because of his poor handwriting. At a family party, the guests take turns at reading the latest missive. One of the attempts at a particular sentence gives rise to the novel’s title: “I find Sakina’s kisses preferable.” The jovial mood this inculcates is soon evaporated when another guest parses the real meaning of the passage which is: “I find getting killed preferable to falling into the hands of the police.”

Miscommunication is an underlying theme in the book. Author Shanbhag is also a playwright and clearly takes delight in the sound of words, evidenced by some comic passages such as a section where Venkat and Viji try out American pronunciations. It is a credit to translator Srinath Perur that both the fun and the sense is preserved in the adaptation to English from the original Kannada.

The novel concludes by referencing its beginning: the quote about consequences. The scene is such a post-modern cliché as to be deliberate. To discover whether anything is missing after a burglary, Venkat empties all the treasured keepsakes from his almirah and piles them onto the bed with him. Shanbhag writes:

A rectangular bed, just like a page, and on it, like Ramana’s crows-feet-sparrows-feet writing, a jumble of things, including me waiting to be assigned meaning.

This sentence invites several interpretations. The most literal, that Venkat is an irrelevant blank space, becomes concerning because the story has already shown that his inaction, or oscillation, has a serious impact. Worse, Venkat has also been pictured, like an internet troll, losing his head when he does receive any kind of attention. The flattery trumps any kind of critical thought or foresight. Influence, in the wrong hands, is a dangerous weapon.

Fortunately Venkat has changed by the end of the story. He ponders a meeting with the police about the burglary and, finally, considers the “consequences” of doing so. Of course, being Venkat, he doesn’t make a decision, but it’s a start. It also leaves a raft of questions for the reader about power, who has it and how they use it. Doing nothing can be worse than doing something, Shanbhag is saying. For if the weak inherit the earth, where will we all be?

Jane Wallace is a Hong Kong-born journalist and author living in London.