Growing up, I used to miss reading about other countries from an Indian perspective. The opinionated desi travelogue that would tell you just how beautiful London’s parks are but how tasteless its cold sandwiches. I say this not because I want Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel Odysseus Abroad to be that book but because it so nearly is.
The book’s ‘strange and sublime address’ is London, where Anando’s uncle (Rangamama) has spent more than a decade but (or maybe because of that) wallows in Bengaliness and Tagore nostalgia; where Anando’s parents spent many years before going back to India; and where Anando has come to study. It maps London neighbourhoods and tube stations, loiters at King’s Cross, Euston and Oxford Street, wanders between Warren Street and Belsize, and comes to rest in Bangladeshi restaurants serving pilau and jhaalfrezi .
The book is peppered with throwaway but acrid remarks about the ‘lucky island with more than its fair share of fortune’, the ‘nannying’ English who ‘remind you punctiliously to cross your t’s’, and the city’s ‘zebra crossings, tea bags and dry, clipped way of speaking’. When I mention this to Chaudhuri, he talks of how miserable he was as a student in London in the 1980s, a time when art, empire and socialism were ending and Thatcher was coming in. And how for a long time he refused to engage with England, till he finally went to Oxford with Afternoon Raag .
This absorption with place is apposite, given that Chaudhuri famously rejects plot. The book does not really tell a story at all but lingers on conversations, impressions, commentaries. And, taking off from Joyce’s Ulysses , it spans one day in the lives of Anando (Telemachus-Stephen Dedalus) and his uncle (Odysseus-Leopold Bloom). And yet it doesn’t quite feel like 24 hours as it wanders between streets, continents and generations in a capricious if not quite stream-of-consciousness trajectory.
The protagonist Anando is Bengali — and it’s intriguing how important it is to say ‘Bengali’ and not ‘Indian’ — who obsesses about his noisy neighbours, his mother, food and poetry. He appears to spend a lot of time with his maternal uncle, who is in turn fixated with his digestion (related in hilarious and excruciating detail), Tagore (no other poet exists), food and other fetishes. They make an eccentric pair as they wander about a London whose waitresses and bookstore owners intimidate them, discussing Keats, aliens, and James Bond who, far less fixated with hygiene than they are, eschews tooth-brushing and morning ablutions for swift action. “Pupu,” says his uncle, wondering how they would deal with death-defying situations, “We’d be hopeless!”
But, for all this, the book is an almost abstracted affair. And although we follow the pair as they walk around the city with insidious intent, they never do lead you to any overwhelming question. There is no epiphany here, no grand denouement, and that might well be what the author intends — the triviality, the utter sameness of the quotidian life in England leavened only by the darts and barbs of two quicksilver minds — but it leaves you with a slightly hollow sense of discontent. As though you had thought you might be biting into rich fruitcake but it turned out to be airy choux pastry instead.
Where I tasted richness was in the lingering flashbacks — how Anando’s father Satish and Rangamama had been best friends, how Satish met and married Rangamama’s sister Khuku. The threesome’s early days in London, how they pretended herring was their beloved ilish and made smacking noises as they ate, and Rangamama’s heartbreak as he finds his beloved sister increasingly free of him and dependent on her new husband. I smelt Sylhet, Shillong and untold stories in these by-lanes of Rangamama’s memories, and it made me greedy for more.
Chaudhuri’s art is that of a miniaturist, dwelling on specifics with a delicate and detailed brush. In this particular book, as you zoom out, the big picture loses some of that sharp clarity and dissolves into a pleasant blur.
Odysseus Abroad;Amit Chaudhuri, Penguin, Rs.599.
