My Friend Sancho;
By Amit Varma; Hachette India
Pages: 217; Price: Rs195
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Somewhere between the ranting of a perilously insecure lizard, a genial police officer who speaks English in “bulleted points” and the discomfiture of his increasing affection for a girl called Muneeza he met under complicated circumstances, Abir Ganguly’s world is a perplexing one. Amit Varma’s protagonist — a young journalist covering the crime beat for a Mumbai tabloid — is presented as an ambitious yet apathetic individual with clever wit and a hyperactive imagination.
Muneeza is someone Abir meets in order to profile her deceased father who was killed in a police encounter, being mistaken as a gangster. Her nick name is Sancho (as in Sancho Panza from Don Quixote) and, thus, the title of the book My Friend Sancho. During the process of discovering his subject, the protagonist evolves as a person himself and becomes a more sensitive journalist. This is the unexpected love story of Abir, a callous coffee-sipping cynic from a “privileged background”, and Muneeza, a simple girl clad in ill-fitting salwar kameezes who belongs to the “real world”.
Expressed in deliberately minimalist prose, Varma grazes issues regarding class divides, religious prejudices and the contingency of law as subject to social-standing disguises in pungent humour — a quality that is characteristic of a popular blogger like himself.
This review was published in the Businessworld issue dated 26 May-01 June 2009
Book Reviews 
My Friend Sancho;
