The parable of hyper imagination

Adventures in Moneypur is about a boy, who earns the ire of people for having a deft hand at drawing caricatures.

Adventures in Moneypur
Author: Swapna Mirashi
Publisher: Navneet
Price: Rs 90

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Adventures in Moneypur is Swapna Mirashi’s second book. In the author’s note she states that the “real word is often fancier than fantasy, full of mysteries and adventures”.

While this may be true, what is interesting fact about the book is that Mirashi tries to handle the complexities of finance by presenting them in an easy to understand way.

It, of course, is a unique manner of doing so, given that most of us can’t figure out our right from the left when it comes to handling finance. But that’s about where the novelty ends.

For even though the novel begins on a promising note, the narrative soon follows the tried and tested method of introducing cloyingly sweet characters, which is the trademark of all the hacks of children’s literature.

And there are so many of them that you resign yourself to the (mis) adventures of the plot inflicted upon the hapless duo of Honey and Money.

They are the central characters (the latter being an animated coin), which through their fortuitousness try to convince the reader that it’s not a sin to worship Mammon. The novel is about Honey, a precocious boy, who earns the ire of those around him for having a deft hand at drawing caricatures.

Honey’s skill and temperament seem to be smothered in the materialistic world of Grownupolis, where education is the means to prosperity, which awaits the deserving ones at Prosper Street ET.

The delinquents and truants have their own hell in the form of Hardship Street. You get the drift that Mirashi takes things too literally, and hence there are these tiresome names. Then there are the gaps in the plot.

There are a lot of needless characters, which appear and disappear in every other line like all the intrepid warriors in some Greek epic. Also, Mirashi doesn’t take the trouble of telling the reader that the novel is set in the future where children drive tuk tuks to school and master “The Method” for that elusive address on Prosper Street ET.

Fortunately, for the reader and Honey alike fate intervenes in the form of Guru Future Rishi, who chooses Honey to be his disciple on Moneypur Island, which obviously is untraceable on the map. The novel can be enjoyable if one can ignore all these things.

In fact, it could have had a broader appeal but for the author’s lack of subtle story telling. Thus Swapna Mirashi’s attempts at sermonising about the virtues of managing one’s money seem affected at best.