THE ARTS:BELFAST ON a Saturday morning. Two young men are waiting outside the Europa Hotel. They have football gear with them. A third arrives, obviously hung over. He says it took him 10 minutes to stand up straight. He doesn't think he can play. His team-mates are not sympathetic. He has no choice; there is no sub. Inside the hotel, the lobby is early-morning busy.
Newspapers are being snapped open; the smell of coffee would waken the dead. The receptionist looks at the man on the book jacket and says she has seen him. On cue, Amit Chaudhuri steps from the elevator on his way to check his e-mails. He glances over at the desk and knows we are looking at him. Few things in life are certain, but there is little doubt that the good-natured, precise Chaudhuri is astute and perceptive, and misses nothing – except setting aside sufficient time to organise a visa to enter the Republic.
It all began quietly and emphatically – as early as the opening paragraph of his first book, A Strange and Sublime Address, which was published in 1991, when he was 29 but looked about a decade younger. Now he is about a month short of 47 and looks about 30, with a face most accurately described as beautiful. "It's not a good thing in India, looking young, it's is much better to appear older – you get respected."
That first book was extraordinary. “A boy stood clinging to the rusting iron gate, while another boy pushed it backward and forward. As he did so, the first boy travelled in a small arc through space. When the taxi stopped in front of the house, they stared at it with great dignity for a few moments, then ran off in terror, leaving the gate swinging mildly and illegally.”
That book, consisting of the title novella and several short pieces, predictably won a fistful of prizes, but far more importantly it established him as an outstanding new voice. Afternoon Raag followed two years later with its blend of Oxford student life and scenes of everyday life in Mumbai. It is his subtle evocation of the ordinary that makes Chaudhuri so special. The ordinary is real. “And in that is truth,” he says.
Even in the context of contemporary Indian writing in English, much of which is outstanding, Chaudhuri is the best. His fifth novel, The Immortals, has just been published and yet again he has shown that his fiction, which draws on themes of family and time, is as real as it is beautiful. His art has both ease and grace; somehow he makes it all look so easy. Any time the subject of contemporary Indian fiction comes up, one immediately intones: "Read Chaudhuri – it is as if you are walking the streets, entering the houses, listening to the everyday conversations. There are no tricks, no sideshows."
THE MAN HIMSELFadmits to being curious about Belfast. "So this is Belfast," he says. "It would be interesting to have a look around it, don't you think?" Looking out the window, he points to what looks like a traditional pub and asks "would that be typical?"
Now living in Calcutta (officially now Kolkata), he still sees himself as a newcomer to that city. “It is strange. I was born there but I grew up in Bombay. They’re very different places. Calcutta is a great Indian city. Its decay is part of its aesthetic. And then I lived in England. I have been back for what? Ten years.”
Having left India at 21 to study English literature, first at University College London and then moving on to Oxford for postgraduate studies on the poetry of DH Lawrence at Balliol College and later Wolfson College, where he was a fellow, he also understands Britain and is as well versed in popular culture as he is in the intellectual life. He is also a lively talker, with views and opinions on everything. He asks, in that polite but very direct way he has: "What did you think of Slumdog Millionaire?" Obviously he is not pleased with the slap-happy face of India it presents. Does he love his country? "I do and I don't. There are many things I don't like about it. But the physical sense of India, the country, the people, this I do love."
The difficulty with focusing exclusively on his books is that he is also a musician and singer and very popular – his phone keeps flashing messages, including a text from Switzerland. He sees himself as a novelist and a musician, but it is the music he speaks about, largely because his evolution as a singer is a story in itself. Growing up in a Bengali household meant he was cosmopolitan, open to all kinds of cultural influences, and his musical taste was western and based on singer- songwriters such as Paul Simon – " Gracelandis a masterpiece" – Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Eric Clapton. "I played the guitar and sang," says Chaudhuri, who effectively evokes an image of an Indian teenager sitting in his Mumbai bedroom and singing the same material as his US peers were in bedrooms across the US. Classical Indian music appears to have been something of which he was aware, particularly as his mother is a singer, but his interests lay elsewhere. "Then when I went to England, and heard the awful music of the 1980s I said 'no, enough', and gave it all up."
HE PUT AWAYhis guitar. His writing took over and a poem he wrote impressed Karl Miller of the London Review of Books. Chaudhuri became a published writer while at university, and few first novels gathered such admiring reviews from major literary critics. He smiles at the memory and is honest enough to admit he enjoyed it. For all his success, Chaudhuri is very well liked; he is also respected as an honest critic. It was Chaudhuri who compiled The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature,published in 2001. It is essential reading for anyone not only with an interest in Indian writing, but particularly for those who think they are well-informed on the subject. This is an eye-opening volume. As well as Chaudhuri drawing attention to his peers – when I mention Upamanyu Chatterjee's The Last Burden(1993), Chaudhuri looks donnish and responds with "ah yes, but have you read English, August: An Indian Story? That is the one to read" – he included selections from Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil and the languages of the south. It was hugely important.
“The problem is that there are Indian languages, with their own literatures,” he says, and stresses that he was aware only the English-language writers were being considered. As he asks in his introduction to the anthology: “Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English? More importantly, is it possible to assess properly and appreciate the merits of this handful of writers without any recourse to the diverse intellectual traditions to which they do or do not belong?”
Chaudhuri agrees that it was as if Indian writing was only being regarded as a colonial by-product, and for all the achievements of the great RK Narayan, who was born in 1907, and VS Naipaul, who has lived in Britain for more than 50 years, there is a great deal more to Indian literature. He refers to the Bengali Renaissance, which was literary and spanned the mid-19th to early 20th century.
WHILE LIVING IN LONDON, Chaudhuri was very much a visible part of the British literary establishment. Freedom Song, his third novel, was well received, while the publication of A New World in 2000 was both a literary and personal landmark. By then his wife, Rinka (an academic), and he had decided to return to India with their infant daughter, Radha. Chaudhuri was living in Calcutta when the book came out. It is a superb study of dislocation. It tells the story of Jayojit, a successful academic who, having married an Indian girl and having had a son and part of the good life in the US, sees it disintegrate. At 37 he is in freefall, finding himself divorced and none too pleased about it, his wife having left him for her doctor.
Depressed and overweight, Jayojit returns to Calcutta with his son to visit his parents. At no time is he presented as a hero. He is not even particularly sympathetic, self-absorbed as he is in his personal dilemma. His parents, loving mother and gruff but affectionate and ailing father, are brilliantly drawn. They are helpless in the face of the failure of their son’s marriage. At the end of the holiday, which has been spent largely in the stuffy apartment on the run from the heat (and no one conveys heat better than Chaudhuri), the parents accompany their son and grandson to the airport. They wait for the flight to be called. With only minutes left, Jayojit announces he is going to check out the bookshop. “It was brutal, leaving them at that moment, but he felt he must do something, go somewhere . . .”
These are observations Chaudhuri brings to his fiction. His instincts are similar to those of William Trevor. The more Chaudhuri speaks about music and how he returned to embrace classical Indian music – which he performs in tandem with his more experimental work, which juxtaposes riffs from Clapton and Hendrix – the more insight he gives into his latest book, The Immortals.In this beautiful novel of music and time, hopes and regrets, a son also follows a mother into the world of song. The character Nirmalya, the son, pursues a more draconian approach to his art than Chaudhuri admits to, while the mother is aware she has neglected her singing potential by attending to her duties as a wife and mother.
It is a wonderful book that succeeds in being about nothing in particular and everything in general, the formula that Chaudhuri has perfected. He is a rare artist and an inspiring writer, who shares a genius akin to the Russian Andreï Makine. Writing comes naturally to him possibly because he understands how to live, how to watch and how to listen.
