Jayojit, now divorced, returns home to his native Calcutta from his life as a US academic, to visit his aged parents. With him is his seven-year-old son. The little boy is described as "staring mutely at his grandmother, as if he were lip reading."
The scene continues as Chaudhuri writes of the child, "he could follow the language - he had so often heard his mother and father talk in it in his first five years - but he could not speak it. It was both a disadvantage and an odd privilege that set him apart, and caused others around him here to make that small extra effort to communicate themselves to him."
It seems so simple, but therein lies Chaudhuri's genius, his feel for the tiny details combined with his gentle tone and exactness which ensure an image becomes an eloquent statement.
This is the fourth novel from one of the most gifted writers currently working in English. On the publication of his beautiful debut, A Strange and Sublime Address in 1991, in which Sandeep, a young Bombay boy visits relatives in Calcutta, Chaudhuri was recognised as special: "Sandeep, meanwhile, had come to the conclusion that the grown-ups were mad, each after his or her own fashion. Simple situations were turned into complex dramatic ones; not until then did everybody feel important and happy." Chaudhuri's is a fiction of observation and the purity of the remembered moment, rather than plot. With each succeeding book, his web has become even more irresistible.
Afternoon Raag (1993) in which the narrator evokes memories of his Indian childhood and his student days at Oxford University, which were complicated by two awkward and simultaneous romances, is elegant and graceful as well as an astonishing demonstration of a writer walking the tight rope between two cultures and two sensibilities. Freedom Song (1998) which brings modern-day India to life, is an important as well as powerful and humane study of a country and this new novel which attempts to get close to the heart of a disappointed, rootless man who does not reveal his feelings, approaches the level of insight expected of a Saul Bellow.
But Chaudhuri is not only concerned with his disgruntled if neutral central character, he is also interested in the family. Jayojit's parents have been devastated by the divorce. His ailing father, the Admiral "a heart condition and diabetes had made him slow" has been living on borrowed time for the past seven years. He is also aloof, "he was one of those men who, after independence, had inherited the colonial's authority and position, his club cuisine and table manners, his board meeting and discipline; all along he had bullied his wife for not being as much a memsahib as he was a sahib."
In the character of his wife, Jayojit's mother, Chaudhuri has created a convincing portrait of a loving mother who is both torn and sustained by her domestic tragedies. While her son broods and her husband ails, Mrs Chatterjee cooks badly though tirelessly while fretting over her grandson and the washing. Chaundhuri prevents her from becoming a caricature, but when she announces, "He doesn't like fish" and the author observes, "She had a martyred look" it is impossible not to laugh. In common with so many of the best of the contemporary Indian writers, he has a natural feel for humour. Admittedly many of his peers have perfected a hilarious humour of exasperation, Chaudhuri's is subtle, true to the gentle tone of his work.
When Chhotomama, Sandeep's uncle in A Strange and Sublime Address, and one of Chaundhuri's vivid characters, suffers a heart attack, the patient realises there is no time to think and notes to himself, "being ill was a kind of entertainment, a communal ceremony; it involved such a lot of people." Elsewhere in that book, a wooden clothes horse "with several horizontal bars running parallel to, and on top of, each other" is described. "One would have expected to find it in a gymnasium, but here it was - it was called an alna, and all kinds of clothes and garments hung from its ribs. A lizard lived behind it."
As is the bewildered and equally detached narrator of Afternoon Raag, Jayojit is an Indian who has become part of, or at least attuned to, another culture. Still smarting over the wife who left him, he recalls his wedding which Chaundhuri describes him as having attended "like a tourist". Jayojit "was one of those who had no time for tradition; but liked, even in a sentimental way, colour and noise; so he'd reacted to the smoke and fuss of the ritual with the irritation of a visitor in a traffic jam, but had said, with genuine delight, `Absolutely wonderful: Bismillah Khan!' when he'd heard the sound of the shehnai."
Chaundhuri's calm, atmospheric world, rooted in Indian culture and yet with the additional space of a consciousness alert to Britain and the US, is unforgettable. What makes this new book so impressive is the careful, almost watchful way he tracks his unhappy central character through the aftermath of a personal crisis. Jayojit is true to his personality, he is neither sympathetic nor dislikeable. He is neutral and presented as never knowing what to do "when someone spoke to him uninvited. His self-confidence actually hindered him when he was asked to interact with a person outside his social sphere." Though locked in his own problems, Jayojit is still alert to the quiet suffering of others. When he meets an elderly neighbour briskly walking her small dog, he recalls a few years earlier she would have been assisting her husband, "a man who'd been reduced by a stroke to shouting his sentences."
Yet again Chaudhuri has proven that there is so much more to the contemporary Indian novel than Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. With such gifted practitioners as Amitav Ghosh whose novels include The Circle of Reason, Vikram Chandra, Ardashir Vakil, and the seriously under-celebrated Anita Desai, Indian fiction is thriving. Chaundhuri, who was born in 1962, already stands shoulder to shoulder with the wonderful Rohinton Mistry whose Booker shortlisted debut Such A Long Journey (1991) is even better than his dazzling second novel, also a Booker runner-up, A Fine Balance (1995). At times A New World echoes Upamanyu Chatterjee's magnificent domestic saga The Last Burden (1993), which is possibly the finest Indian novel yet published in English. Indian fiction possesses a rich, vibrant voice. Its finest writers are honouring the legacy of R.K. Narayan and Amit Chaudhuri is among the best. A New World is the story of an ordinary man's wry acceptance of a sense of failure, it is also a generous, unsentimental and often moving account of life as lived.
Amit Chaudhuri: yet again he has proven that there is so much more to the contemporary Indian novel than Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth
