Our Moments

The situation in which we find ourselves at the beginning of Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World is familiar, from life and in fiction:

He had come back in April, the aftermath of the lawsuit and the court proceedings in two countries still fresh, the voices echoing behind him.

This is a divorce novel, or rather an après-divorce novel. Jayojit, sometimes called Joy, accompanied by his seven-year-old son, Vikram, nicknamed Bonny, has come to Calcutta to visit his parents: his father, a retired admiral (“the Admiral”), and his mother, the hoveringly attentive Mrs. Chatterjee. He’s come from America, where he is a tenured professor of economics at a Midwestern college, having secured partial custody of his child after a protracted struggle in American and Indian courts. Joy and Bonny arrive in April, when the heat of summer sets in, and they will stay for the arrival of the monsoon. Then back to teaching and school and the United States.

Two countries, several generations, families coming together for a while, others coming apart for good, explored in the defined time of a vacation, analogous if not identical to the twenty-four hours of classical tragedy and the modernist novel, and, central to the book, a man aggrieved, relieved, bewildered by past and present but bent on getting on with things. The word “new” goes to the newsy core of the novel as a genre, and in A New World everything is prepared to pique our readerly curiosity as to how all this will work out—or not. Pique and presumably satisfy, since veteran readers will have their expectations about how such things—stories, novels—are supposed to go. One of those expectations is that expectations will be met.

“Are we here, baba?” Bonny asks his father. We are still on the first page of the book. It’s a child’s question, asked and asked by children en route, often to the exasperation of parents. Well yes, they have gotten where they are going at last, at least for now. They are here, yes—or there—as we are all here, but then again, you might ask, finding ourselves here, where in the world are we? That question becomes ever more encompassing and ever more elusive as Amit Chaudhuri’s novel proceeds, continually undoing the novelistic formulas it initially puts in play. The reader reads his way to a world that, mysteriously, quietly, reveals itself to be as unknown as it is known, and new.

*

A New World, published in 2000, was Chaudhuri’s fourth novel. His first, A Strange and Sublime Address, came out in 1991, when he was still in his twenties. It is a book of precocious assurance, originality, and poise, startling to this day. Two others, Afternoon Raag and Freedom Song, followed in 1993 and 1998. Misleadingly marketed as a trilogy in the US, the three books—variously about a child visiting relatives in Calcutta; a young student in Oxford pulled between two women, as between the UK and India; and the confusions of a Bengali family, in part awakened by the destruction in 1992 of the Babri Masjid by a fanatical Hindu mob—mapped out a distinctive imaginative world and a distinctive approach to the novel. They were filmic, in the way of Satyajit Ray and Yasujiro Ozu, a loose weave of present scenes, and they were, as Chaudhuri’s titles signaled, musical. (Chaudhuri was trained and as a classical Indian vocalist and continues to perform.)

Equally, though unobtrusively, the books harkened back to foundational works of twentieth-century literature—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mrs. Dalloway, Lawrence’s novels—and the artful attention to the shifting burden of human perception that those books display. Finally, in writing about India, Chaudhuri treated it not as an exotic place, a place apart, but rather as part of a larger modern world, putting both India and the world in a new perspective. He doffed the glamorous magical hat of Salman Rushdie and set aside the provincialism—exotic in a different way—of R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi novels.

A New World reprises themes and concerns from its predecessors, but with a new comprehensiveness. It takes the measure of what Chaudhuri had done, his new way with the novel, and the expanded sense of the world he had opened up. The consummation of his early style, it may be seen to prepare a path for the autofictional turn of his subsequent work. The book, about a turning point in a man’s life, has the concentration and passion of being a turning point itself.

So what happens in A New World? Days happen. The Calcutta apartment to which Jayojit’s parents have retreated after leading a military family’s roving life is small and uncomfortable. Only one room—Joy and Bonny’s—is air-conditioned. The lingering effects of a stroke mostly keep the Admiral indoors; he is the overweight shadow of the booming, boozy man he once was. To him Jayojit speaks English; to his mother, Bengali. Mrs. Chatterjee oversees the household and struggles over dinner. Bonny pushes the food away. Jayojit starts to put on weight. The Chatterjees remain unhappy about the end of the marriage; they hope their son will remarry and return to India, though that is what the long fight over Bonny precludes. Jayojit kills time, reading the newspaper, sketching a book, going to central Calcutta to visit the bank or the bookstore. Then the rains come, a relief, and then there is the usual, ineffable switch from having just arrived and not quite settled in to having not quite settled in and being about to depart.

Father and son are at the heart of the novel: their visit is the event it records, but the question of what will happen to them is as much frame as it is subject. We hear a lot about Jayojit’s boredom and his regrets—the man is impatient, observant, irritable, and tender—while the Admiral, confined to the background as he is confined to the apartment, is a character, comic and sad, Dickensian. Mrs. Chatterjee is Mrs. Chatterjee. Bonny, in the trance of childhood, remains a cypher, to himself as much as to others, and the cynosure of everyone’s concern: “The boy was wearing a bright-blue t-shirt and shorts, and on his back there was a kind of rucksack; he walked with the mournful loping air of a miniature expeditioner.” Foreground and background continually shift. A loud party is going on at a new house down the street: “Behind this, ancient but entirely of the present, was the sound of crickets.”

*

The book is layered like a deck of cards—and full of overlapping circles. (American readers of A New World might think of this novel of India and America as peculiarly Emersonian, keeping in mind, too, Emerson’s partiality to Indian thought.) In it, here is here and now, but also the past. The marriage, first of all. Why, Jayojit wonders, did he marry pretty Amala? Because she was pretty? The marriage was arranged. Bonny was born. After some years Amala decamped with her gynecologist. Actually, the couple never got along, Jayojit reflects, and the reader is left to wonder, was it really so? The question of the marriage also shades into the question of America—that promised paradise of “money and the good life”—to which the couple were so quick to take themselves from stodgy India. By now, however, the “private moods of exuberance [Joy] had in America” have faded. He tells the Admiral, “You know, in the States, no one walks any more…. They go for a ‘work-out’ and walk for hours on a treadmill.” “But why?” his father asks. Jayojit answers, “They don’t want to be alone.”

Jayojit and Amala left for America in the 1980s. Now it is the 1990s. If America has changed in Jayojit’s eyes, so has India, abandoning the socialism of the Nehru era for the neoliberalism du jour. Moving his custody case from an American to an Indian court had made it legally necessary to address “the question of what it was to be ‘Indian,’” while he wonders whether the country’s new economic path might “lead not only to the loss of what was seen to be Indian culture, but to uncontrollable economic disparity.” Such questions, along with others, fill the pages of the novel, but without imposing themselves or finding resolution. They are the questions life presents. Jayojit, always with time on his hands, finds himself looking at black-and-white family photographs from the past century. “In its own and different way,” he thinks, “that time must have been as shadowy and uncertain as any now.”

“Are we here, baba?” The here in which we find ourselves in A New World is a state of sustained suspense. The book moves to the syncopated rhythm of those relentless but irregular units we know as days, weeks, months, years—our moments. Scene is sentence; plot lies in the passage, routine and yet unpredictable, through and between paragraphs. The sentences are acts of attention, touching on the shifting interplay of the larger world—it spans continents and eras—in which the characters live and the smaller world (though is it smaller?) of their perceptions, memories, and needs. The sentences probe these dimensions of experience and understanding without giving priority to any one of them. In Chaudhuri’s books, people see the world around them and the world sees them back: “[The] dog barked to the shadows in the outside world from the eternal but cluttered present of the balcony, amidst pots, a clothesline, and two plastic chairs like dwarves in the background.”

Where, in this tiny panorama, is the center of attention? One of the marvels and pleasures of Chaudhuri’s writing is the easy way his sentences have of turning themselves inside out. Their life, like life, is an uncertain business, but full of love and care and a trace of comic desperation, not unlike Mrs. Chatterjee’s cooking.

*

The millennium looms in A New World. Some of us can remember that unmemorable moment, when, per the pundits, history was said to be over and the world was again flat. The texture of the time is part of A New World, which is, among other things, a political novel. The main character is a political economist. Certain details—like the desolate traffic island in central Calcutta where an ad promotes the new ATM machines by promising Any Time Money—retain an almost allegorical force.

This new, ostensibly borderless world is one in which, Chaudhuri has argued in his critical work, a certain kind of story and certain idea of identity have been relentlessly trafficked. Stories must resolutely have a beginning, middle, and end (lined up in that order), and everybody is said to have a story, like an ID card. And what is the chief function of story? To define and affirm identity. Thus, for example, Indian novels are to be taken as manifestations of the Indian Novel, which must clearly be marked Made in India if it is to have any global currency. Once upon a time—back when A New World was written—these presuppositions were taken as tokens of global prosperity and multicultural diversity. Now, looking around our no-longer-flat world, we can see the reactionary potential of these progressive shibboleths. A New World offers a different kind of novel to a different world: local, cosmopolitan, quizzical, inhabited, seen, and felt.

Late in the book Jayojit, its unsettled center, is reminded of a discovery he has made in the course of the lonely, unhappy time he has been—is still—going through. He remembers talking on the phone from America to his mother and overhearing the loud drumming that marks a religious holiday in the background. He thinks of how fervently his ex-wife used to pray, so odd, so impossible to him, an unbeliever. And yet now, remembering this, he realizes that somehow since then he has come to believe in “the efficacy of prayer; of aloneness, which is what prayer was.”

We have heard about aloneness before—the aloneness that follows divorce; the aloneness that, he told his father, America shuns; the aloneness that is nowhere to be found, it seems, in India; the aloneness to which life condemns us after all—and yet the moment is a surprise. It epitomizes the matter-of-fact, proudly mundane and yet otherworldly, even utopian, vision that sets Chaudhuri apart in contemporary fiction. There is a world elsewhere, the book affirms against the odds. It’s right here.