"Real Time" by Amit Chaudhuri
nkdatta8839
April 16, 2002
REAL TIME
Stories and a Reminiscence
By Amit Chaudhuri
184 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $21.
BOOK REVIEW
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In one of the small, elliptical stories in Amit Chaudhuri's uneven new
collection, an apprentice writer declares that she wants to take as
her subject the ordinary detritus of daily life "that we all know but
no one speaks of, the banal, briefly glittering sequence of events,
where the heart beats underneath."
That of course is Mr. Chaudhuri's own subject, as his three powerfully
observed novellas (collected in "Freedom Song," 1999) demonstrated and
as this book of stories attests: the "irrelevances and digressions
that make up lives, and the life of a city," as he once wrote, "the
minute frustrations and satisfactions" afforded by our daily rituals
and routines.
In the stronger tales in "Real Time," Mr. Chaudhuri limns the
trajectory of an entire life in a handful of pages, using a zoom lens
to focus on a telling moment in a character's life, then pulling back
10 or 15 or 20 years to show the ripples left behind in that moment's
wake. Deftly woven into such stories are keyhole glimpses of Calcutta
or Bombay, glimpses that hint at the social changes taking place in
the living rooms and kitchens of those cities and the enduring
importance of class and caste.
In "Four Days Before the Saturday-Night Social" we meet half a dozen
self-conscious adolescents preparing for a high school dance, then
catch up with them more than a decade later, the group having been
dispersed across the subcontinent and the world. In "Words, Silences"
we learn that the awkward feelings induced by a reunion of two old
friends are rooted in a schoolboy sexual encounter some 20 years ago.
And in "Portrait of an Artist," we meet the narrator and his cousin as
teenagers, both of them under the spell of their English tutor, one
harboring dreams of literary success while the other is trying to
choose between a career in science or commerce. One will end up going
to school in England and leaving India more or less for good; the
other will stay in Calcutta, go to work for his father's business and
join a political-theater troupe.
"The Old Masters" recounts a similar story of two friends' divergent
lives: while Pramathesh moves onward and upward to become his
company's general manager in Bombay, his friend Ranjit loses his job
and joins a small company that makes ceiling and table fans. "The
bustling innocence" of Pramathesh's "adult certainties," however, will
be shaken when his son spurns the family's corporate ambitions to
become a musician, and Pramathesh virtually bankrupts himself to send
the boy to London to study the violin.
In such stories a sense of time and flux is conveyed subtly by Mr.
Chaudhuri, who uses elision and montagelike jump cuts to create
musically patterned narratives that immerse the reader in the minutiae
of his characters' lives: their domestic squabbles, their rivalries
with neighbors and colleagues, their niggling worries about the proper
attitude they should assume at a suicide's wake or a woman's second
wedding.
At their best, the stories in this volume combine the folk-art charm
and easygoing improvisations of R. K. Narayan, with the compassion and
evocative atmosphere of Chekhov. "White Lies" — the longest and
most ambitious of the tales — begins as a gently humorous
account of a wealthy housewife's relationship with her singing teacher
and slowly metamorphoses into a story about lost illusions and
compromised ideals, the white lies people tell themselves and others
in order to continue with their daily rituals and routines.
Unfortunately, the slighter pieces are not capacious enough to
accommodate such layered examinations of their characters' lives, and
they devolve into flimsy slice-of-life snapshots of people attending
parties or reading books or worrying about a promotion. The handful of
stories that eschew the details of everyday life in Calcutta or Bombay
are even less substantial. Two ("An Infatuation" and "The Wedding")
are cursory retellings of episodes taken from Hindu mythologies and
read like Cliffs Note versions of old fairy tales. A third ("The Great
Game") attempts to create a panoramic portrait of people attending a
cricket match, while clumsily inserting references to a terrorist in
order to build suspense.
As for the memory piece titled "E-Minor," it is a rambling poem
recounting events from the author's life, events that underscore the
autobiographical sources of so many of these stories. The
upper-middle-class upbringing, the father with a big job at a British
firm, the burgeoning love of literature, the schooling abroad in
England, all are elements refracted and reinvented in the fiction.
"My problem was how to suffer," Mr. Chaudhuri writes, "for I
knew/suffering to be essential to art; and yet/there was little cause
for suffering; I had loving parents and everything I required. I
disowned our Mercedes-Benz, took the 106 bus, but remained/unable to
solve my lack of want."
But if the author worried that his life included "all the wrong
ingredients" for "the birth of poetry," he somehow learned how to turn
his privileges into a sympathy for how others lived, his sense of
being an outsider into keen powers of observation. Although some of
the stories in "Real Time" fail to showcase those gifts, the stronger
entries burnish the reputation he established in "Freedom Song," while
reaffirming his talent for articulating the poetry of everyday life.
nkdatta8839
April 21, 2002
The Universe of Calcutta
REAL TIME: Stories and a Reminiscence, By Amit Chaudhuri,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 192 pp., $21
BOOK REVIEW
By SHASHI THAROOR
If the world of letters has begun paying more attention of late to
Indian writing in English, the time has certainly come to pay tribute
to its astonishing diversity. Gone are the days when Indian novelists
could be lumped together as "Midnight's Children," heirs to Salman
Rushdie's triumphant insertion of the larger-than-life histories and
myths of the subcontinent into the canon of English literature.
Now they paint on a broader canvas, or on several, with an output
ranging from sly comedies of manners to rodomontade reinventions of
history, from the soaring fantasies of magical realism to the
meticulously observed depiction of daily life in contemporary India.
Amit Chaudhuri made that final category virtually his own in three
slender novels, which an American publisher finally issued in one
volume, the well-received "Freedom Song," in 1999. His new collection,
"Real Time," is marked by the same languid love of detail and absence
of drama. The book's subtitle, "Stories and a Reminiscence," is
slightly misleading. Many of the pieces in this volume are not stories
but ruminations, and the reminiscence appears as 26 pages of blank
verse, charming but literal in its evocation of the author's childhood
("To write about it in verse/ is to make palpable to myself the
experience"). But "Real Time" nonetheless showcases many of the
strengths and limitations of Chaudhuri's writing.
As one might expect, several of the author's tales are not short
stories so much as slices of life, tenderly evoked in abundant detail.
Some are unabashedly autobiographical, and one is a somewhat
vainglorious meditation on the author's celebrity as a writer,
redeemed only by its closing sentence: "There are a few who spit on
me, because they think I am not worthy."
But aside from two whimsically playful reinventions of episodes from
Hindu mythology, "Real Time" is a symphony in one register. It
conjures a middle-class urban Indian world with precise and loving
evocations of place and setting--complete with a litany of
untranslated Bengali words and Indian brand names (Britannia biscuits,
Larsen & Toubro, Limca).
Chaudhuri's writing is touched by a rare delicacy of description ("the
heat had just ebbed into a cloudy, dream-like vacancy") and a keen
sense of the unwritten, unspoken rules that govern human
relationships, particularly in a society in which so much is dictated
by the expectations flowing from age, caste, gender and economic
class.
He understands better than most how people are complicit in their own
elisions. But nothing much happens in Chaudhuri's fiction; in his
books, in a curious reversal of the uncertainty principle, the act of
observation does nothing at all to the objects being observed.
So the writing is key. While it would be unfair to any writer to speak
of a "typical" paragraph, it is useful to consider one that is fairly
representative of Chaudhuri:
"'She just finished her bath,'" said Anjali (who was wearing a light
brown salwaar kameez herself), cheerfully announcing, in medias res,
the progress of an episode that concerned us all. 'Say hello to Mohon
jethu and Romola mashi. Is it jethu or kaku?' she asked, looking at
me, distracted. She looked pretty after the bath that she herself had
had, and the brown salwaar kameez was rather lovely. I looked at her
and gave her a smile of recognition you sometimes give someone with
whom you spend almost every hour of the day."
There, in five sentences, is the distilled essence of Chaudhuri: the
patience with details so unremarkable that other writers might not
have deigned to notice them; the consciousness of the importance of
precisely delineating relationships ("jethu" and "kaku" are Bengali
designations for uncles older and younger, respectively, than one's
father); the simple innocence of the narrator's use of language, which
masks a deeper insight into the nature of human feeling. This kind of
writing will move some and exasperate others; in this collection of
stories, both reactions are unavoidable.
Is a gift for observation and empathy enough in a writer of fiction?
In the title story, about a couple who go to a wake for a young woman
who committed suicide by throwing herself off her parents' balcony,
there is an unsatisfying sense of possibilities raised and not
explored. The absence of either dramatic tension or resolution affects
most of the stories, some of which, such as "The Party," are
delightful vignettes but little more. A couple of the pieces appear to
have been tossed off rather lightly and do not seem ready to be
anthologized.
Chaudhuri's insights are often interesting, but they are sometimes
spelled out in an over-expository fashion, so that in some cases the
explanation becomes the essence of the story, as it does in "The Old
Masters," whose last two sentences sum up the point for the reader
with an explicitness rendered all the more curious by the author's
refusal to even hint at the purpose of some of his other pensees.
But there is no doubt about Chaudhuri's intelligence or seriousness of
intent. Many of the stories are elaborate tributes to literacy itself,
that striking product of the miscegenation of British words and Indian
sensibilities which found its first and most passionate welcome in the
author's native Calcutta. Names of writers and titles of books
proliferate on these pages:Chaudhuri depicts a world peopled by
Bengali intellectuals whose "first question ... in an English accent
tempered by the modulations of Bengali speech" is "Are you profoundly
influenced by Eliot?"
Elsewhere there is a lovely image of two children, one educated in
Bengali, the other in English, reading side by side, companionably
sharing "worlds that could not be translated into each other."
That is the true measure of Chaudhuri's place in the Indian literary
firmament. As he writes of one of his characters, "Calcutta is his
universe; like a dewdrop, it holds within it the light and colours of
the entire world." "Real Time" reveals a genuine talent performing in
a minor key.