Weight Loss (novel)

infobox Book |
name = Weight Loss


image_caption =
author = Upamanyu Chatterjee
cover_artist = Sarnath Banerjee
country = India
language = English
series =
genre = Black comedy, Novel
publisher = Penguin Books
release_date = 28 February 2006
media_type = Print (Paperback)
pages = 432 pp
isbn = ISBN 0-670-05862-9
preceded_by = The Mammaries of the Welfare State
followed_by =

"Weight Loss" is a 2006 novel by Upamanyu Chatterjee.

Plot summary

Weight Loss is about the strange life (from age 11 to age 37) of a sexual deviant named Bhola, whose attitude to most of the people around him depends on their lust worthiness. Bhola’s tastes are not, to put it mildly, conventional. Sex is a form of depravity for him and he has fetishes about everyone from teachers to roadside sadhus to servants; he progresses from fantasizing about the portly family cook Gopinath to falling “madly in love” with a vegetable-vendor and her husband. This last obsession spans the entire length of the book and most of Bhola’s life – he even ends up studying at a college in an obscure hill-station hundreds of miles from his home because he wants to be near the couple. At various other stages in his life he gets expelled from school for defecating in a teacher’s office, participates in an inexpertly carried out circumcision (one of the book’s many manifestations of the “weight loss” motif) and engages in all forms of debauchery.