ANOTHER dozy day in the life of a resolutely middle-class family in Calcutta. It doesn't sound compelling, on the face of it, and if you approach Amit Chaudhuri's Freedom Song expecting the action-packed prose and teeming canvases favoured by so many Indian writers, you'll be doomed to disappointment. His interest is in the inner lives of his characters, and he sketches them gently, registering changes of emotion as subtle as the dappled reflection of sunlight on a leaf; and as we quietly follow the movements of the passionate Khuku, her calm, conservative husband Shib and their unambitious son Bhaskar, we are lulled into the idea that we are entering their world. In fact, of course, they have slipped like ghosts into ours.
