IF there were awards for unforgettable novel titles, then Vivek Shanbhag’s internationally acclaimed Ghachar Ghochar would surely win all the prizes. It is, his unnamed narrator tells us, a child’s nonsense phrase describing a tangle that can’t be undone – such as a kite string in a twist or the snarled drawstring on a beautiful bride’s petticoat.

That knotty title is, however, not the only unique thing about the 53-year-old Indian author’s magnificent first novel to be translated into English – more will almost certainly follow because he’s a leading literary figure in India and has written three novels, five short story collections and two plays in the South Indian language of Kannada, which has a 1,000-year-old classical tradition, although it is not his mother tongue.

At a spare 118 pages and elegantly written in fewer than 30,000 words, Ghachar Ghochar is the slenderest of novels. Yet, it contains a whole universe, according to the New York Times reviewer, noting that the “crisply plotted” book “is no thicker than my thumb.”

Lavish praise has been heaped upon Shanbhag’s tragicomic tale of a lower middle-class, nouveau riche family living in Bangalore, where the author and his family also live. He’s been called “an Indian Chekhov” and “a writer of rare and wonderful gifts,” while Yiyun Li, Neel Mukerjee and Amit Chaudhuri, among many other notable writers, are admirers of “the finest Indian novel in a decade.” His well-intentioned narrator, with his inability to act, reminded the aforementioned New York Times critic of The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway.

When I meet Shanbhag at the London hotel, where he is staying with his wife, Anuradha, a doctor and mother of their two grown-up sons, we begin with that title.

Was “ghachar ghochar” a secret family phrase when he was a child?

“No,” he replies, “I invented it for this novel. I felt I needed such a phrase when I was about halfway through writing this book, so then I kept it as the title. I wanted to capture the feeling there is in the novel that there is something that cannot be said. I needed something new to [capture] that experience. So it’s made up – it doesn’t exist in any language anywhere in the world.”

Well, it does now, I tell him. I am using it with careless abandon as life today is increasingly ghachar ghochar. Apparently, I’m not alone. Those two sticky words seem destined to pass into the language. “In India, people have actually started using it,” Shanbhag admits. “In one Indian state there was an election recently and there was some division about forming the government. A newspaper reporter wrote that it was all ‘ghachar ghochar.’ So, yes, perhaps you are right and it will end up in dictionaries."

The anonymous narrator first encounters the phrase on his honeymoon as he tries to untangle that sari petticoat string. Anita, his wife, tells him it is ghachar ghochar, a term invented by her young brother to describe a knotted kite string. The narrator’s life inevitably ends up irredeemably tangled as he relates his close-knit family’s rise from ant-infested poverty to wealth from selling spices and a home where each family member has a room of his or her own – he and his strong-minded wife, his parents, his sister and his uncle, who they all live off.

"It is natural to wonder why the six of us should want to live together. What can I say – it is one of the strengths of families to pretend that they desire what is unavoidable,” writes the narrator.

Shanbhag, whose first, prizewinning story was published when he was 16, has been living with the germ of the story he tells in Ghachar Ghochar for more than 25 years. “It was an experience that happened to me then, but the subject matter has been with me for maybe 20 years. I worked as an engineer for Unilever for many years and one of my first jobs was in management and sales training. I happened to visit a salesman’s house. There, I saw the whole family being involved in his job, so much so that they even knew the codes of the products that he was selling. It was amazing! That stayed with me and made me think about the relationship between work and life.

“But, of course, in the last 25 years there have been many changes in Indian life owing to globalisation. That has been a major inspiration. This is a political book – all writing including fiction is political! – as well as being a family story. Still, it’s difficult for me to say where this novel came from. It’s like a river, so many streams come together to make that river just as many streams come together to make a novel.”

Growing up in a small, very beautiful coastal town in Karnataka, he lived with his parents – his father worked in a bank, his mother was a housewife – and sister until he was 17, the age at which he also met and “fell in love” with the works of the late U R Ananthamurthy, the great, award-winning author. “I loved him as well as his writing, then a few years later I met his daughter and I really fell for her. We married when I was 28 and we recently celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary.”

His father-in-law, with whom he had a close relationship even translating some of his works into English, was a huge influence, but he insists that growing up in a small place made him the writer he is today. “A small town is a world in itself,” he says. “One has access to so many things, so many houses, so many institutions, which you don’t have in a city. In big cities, people protect themselves but as a small child I could go anywhere, so that was a privilege and I think it has made a very profound impact on the way I see the world and the way I write. When I write, I call up things I observed as a child, which always surprises me. It’s one of the joys of writing – these memories one suddenly dredges up.”

His schoolteacher grandfather taught him to read Kannada at an early age – his mother tongue is Konkani not Kannada, in which he prefers to write. “My grandfather encouraged me to read a lot, which I think led to me becoming a writer. I still read a great deal – if you write, you must read. It’s important to make time to read because I’m very critical of my own work. I always knew, however, that I wanted to write. My first short story collection was published when I was 22. I knew there was probably no money in it, so I did a science degree and became an engineer.

“I have no regrets about that; it has enriched my life. I have travelled all over the world and met so many different people. It has been tremendous, although I gave up my job some 18 months ago to become a full-time writer, which is nothing to do wth this book. I always planned that.”

Has being a scientist made him a better writer? “It has certainly influenced my work. Engineering teaches you a way of looking at things, whether it is comprehension or precision of expression.”

That precision was important to him when it came to choosing a translator for Ghachar Ghochar. He selected another creative writer, Srinath Perur, whom he has known for several years. They worked closely together for 18 months on the English translation from the original Kannada, which has more than 40 million speakers in India.

“We took the book apart in Kannada, then put it back together again in English, sometimes editing it lightly, adding a scene or two, such as the moment when the narrator returns home after seeing his wife off at the railway station. He looks inside her open wardrobe, touching her saris. He smells her scent, pressing his face into them but the fragrance retreats.”

The narrator is flooded with feelings “until it seemed like I would break.”

Now, Shanbhag confesses, he can’t imagine his novel without that scene in which his narrator remarks of that evaporating perfume, “The more keenly I sought it, the more it receded.” Just like the tangled art of writing and translating and, indeed, living.

Ghachar Ghochar, by Vivek Shanbhag (Faber & Faber, £10).