The central theme of Irwin Allan Sealy’s new book is the nature of work: “I’m trying to write a book about work, the work they do, two men who can’t read and write, and the work I do, a man who lives by the word, and how these regimes overlap.”

The men are Victor, a labourer, who also moonlights as a waiter during the marriage season; Dhani, the old gardener; and Habilis, a mason who has risen to be a contractor, and who has “done all the rebuilding this house has seen: bricklaying, stonemasonry, concreting, plastering, painting, even cowboy plumbing.” The house itself stands on 433 square yards in Racecourse, Dehradun. The Small Wild Goose Pagoda is the story of what happens in those 433 square yards. In many ways, the book seems to be the answer to a question put to Sealy by “the busy editor of an online magazine” in Delhi, a “man who has only entered the kitchen to set down a plate someone else will wash”: “So, what do you do all day?” Sealy dislikes city slickers. He loves Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte: “The great fascination of the Life is that it’s of a fellow provincial; my heart goes out to Charlotte as it never could to a Londoner.”

Sealy likes to play with form. Red was billed as “an alphabet”; The Everest Hotel was “a calendar”; the latest is an almanac. The Trotter-nama, written as a chronicle, Sealy experiments with the “nama” form; in Hero he reinvents the fable. There is a pattern here, as also a theory behind the pattern, which Sealy articulates in the pages of Pagoda. In India’s literary life, writes Sealy, “No homegrown tradition of experimentation exists. You could sit down and try to hammer out a new shape, but it’s simpler to fit an old one out with native content… Something of this sort happened in our painting, a generation of painters lost to Paris, figuring their modernity by mirrors.”

But does it take ten years to hammer out a new shape? And why the urgency to build, build, build? A hooded inquisitor steps out of an almirah on page 197 and rebukes Sealy: “All your fifties. In this time you have written a single book.” The author replies cheekily: “I’ve saved some trees and built a house.” The inquisitor reminds him that the house was already there, that the author has only been rebuilding, that too with help. Instead of working on a turn of plot, Sealy has wasted his time “imagining how the concrete hearth should wrap around the frame of that door you want to block off.” But Sealy is resolute. He explains to the inquisitor that as his 60th birthday approached, he felt his strength was beginning to fail: “I came to realise that any heavy work must be done now or never.” Mental work can be postponed, but very soon will come a day when the author would no longer be able to “lift a hood of mortar”.

Pagoda is not just about building. The almanac form allows Sealy to include in the book “both a recipe and reflection on a septic tank”. The process of ageing and the passage of time is a running thread. While buying a door bolt, Sealy settles on the cheaper one – he’s not going to be around forever. He pulls out his mother’s appliqued napkins: “At sixty… you begin to use things salted away.”

When not building, Sealy, the consummate recluse, is at peace with himself (and his wife and daughter) in his 433 square yards. He climbs up a peach tree and comes down with the perfect specimen, which he then sets down “gently apart from the crowd that await sorting on the table.” He lies in the bathtub, reading, contemplating the ripening mangoes that peep in through an open hatch. The ungainly hornbill is “a model T at the F1”, while the sunbird has had “a piss, done jail time and been to a brothel in Barcelona”. A Mayfly gets trapped behind a mesh door. Sealy releases him at lunchtime: “His one day on earth and he spends three hours in prison.” During a power cut, he is “grateful to gravity,that feeds a shower without electricity”.

This though is, by no means, a gentle book. Sealy reserves especial scorn for the Indian middle class, a class that has “never made a bed”. The evasion of labour, the “habitual delegating of practical tasks is enfeebling”, and also explains why our “hardware lags behind the software”. The divide between the working class and the middle class is a recurring theme. Once when Sealy overpays his old gardener, he decides to let it go: “In a class society overpayment is notional anyway. How much do I owe this man who lives in a garage? How much does he owe me?
So what’s R500?” Every once in a while there comes a book that is like no other. This marvelous and beautiful meditation on something as elemental as a plot of land is one of them. The author’s simple yet evocative pen and ink sketches, with their firm lines and pregnant minimalism, make Pagoda a double delight.

In an interview with Time Out, Sealy told us why he finds a complete failure of imagination in the middle class.

When did you figure that parrots can fly backwards?
Parrots are the enemy. Not to put too fine a point on it, they’re the archenemy. You watch your enemies closely, right? Well, I swear to God I saw this parrot in my lychee tree do a fiendish manoeuvre that carried him one branch back, while hovering. You don’t find good birds doing that sort of thing.

Why do you find physical work alluring? Even when writing Trotter-nama, you worked in a shoe store.
Shoe factory. If I did physical work for a living I’d find mental work alluring. A mental workout is no fun if you’ve been hunched over a laptop all day. Smack down the laptop lid, nip out and stir up a batch of cement mortar: no rush like that. The smell of a wet brick compared to the stink of a wet jockstrap in a gym.

You write about how a lover, after a certain point, begins to dread achieving what he is wooing. When you have finished building do you feel satisfaction or is there further restlessness?
You definitely want a break. The good part is that you can afford one. The real worker in brick or stone or iron just has to go on working. The laptop keypad feels soo good when you go back to it: the lightest punch – that sexy underspring to each key! – is heaven.

You say: “After a life of mental work, I was ripe for doing.” Is the doing done now? Or is there more to come?
There’s more to come, of course: part compulsion, part the physics of wear and tear. Maintenance is a drag mostly, but then you think: if I do it this way instead… and the whole thing gets suddenly interesting and out of hand in a crazy addictive expanding loop that you only nominally regret. The pleasure is working out problems in real space; we’re too hooked on real time.

Who do you dig the most – Bips, Rihanna or Bjork? (You make a passing reference to all three.) Bips, no contest. Then Bjork. Then Rihanna. Actually I could do without Rihanna altogether; the question is can she do without me?

What makes our middle class so effing lazy? Why can’t we mop the floor or paint a shelf?
It’s not bone laziness, just a failure of imagination. To imagine the satisfactions of work takes a little tweaking of custom. The incapacity is just conditioning, coddling from birth on. Caste is at the root, of course, and maybe climate. And then the price of labour. Servants are dirt cheap equals servants are dirt.

The Small Wild Goose Pagoda, Aleph, R595.