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Literary Review
Odds and ends
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The stories in Real Time need to be read as accompanists, not the main players, in the scheme of Chaudhuri's work, says NILANJANA ROY.
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CONSIDER an imaginary library, composed entirely of books never written for very good reason. Such a library might include a shelf of philosophical works by Jack London; or light romantic women's magazine fiction by James Ellroy; or perhaps the collected short stories of Proust or Jane Austen. That last shelf would be where this volume of collected short pieces by Amit Chaudhuri belongs. Neither Proust nor Austen are known for short stories: their impact depended on the gradual unfolding of lovingly accreted detail, as in a slightly lesser key, does Chaudhuri's undeniable talent.
Real Time is the first collection of short stories from Chaudhuri, and is likely to disappoint those who have acquired a taste for either his literary criticism or his novels. Stories and a Reminiscence, as the subtitle has it, doesn't begin to describe the ragbag of odds and ends included. Of the 17 pieces, two are retellings from mythology, one of the Surpanakha episode in the Ramayana, one of Shiva's marriage. Two are autobiographical reminiscences in verse. One piece is a droll reflection on the kind of writer the "boom" in IWE is bringing out of the closet. "Beyond Translation" is a brilliant short essay, which juxtaposes the narrator, who reads nothing in Bengali, against his cousins, who read nothing in English: "Sitting side by side, we would begin to read almost immediately, enveloped in the same contentment as we read our books in different languages, inhabiting differing imaginary worlds." Many of the other stories are set in Calcutta, with one or two exceptions moored in the world of the bhadralok — a landscape that has previously brought out the best of Chaudhuri's talents.
But the variety of these offerings, which should have been the strength of Real Time, makes one wonder whether Chaudhuri exercised enough editorial control, or whether he merely dumped outtakes and new work together into this receptacle. The two twists on mythology have the cringe-making quality of creative writing exercises no sooner undertaken than discarded. (I remember feeling the same sense of embarrassment on behalf of another talented writer, Vikram Seth, when he decided to publish his early verse, Mappings. Some aspects of the literary journey into maturity are best kept a closely guarded secret between the author and the wastebasket.) The verse reminiscences are mildly amusing, and display Chaudhuri's ability to select the truly telling detail from the detritus of memory, but they are strictly in a minor key.
The same skills that work so well in his novels are brought to bear on the more conventional stories in Real Time, with mixed results. The only way to read these stories is, indeed, in real time; allow them to unfold as companion pieces to his better-known work and a pattern emerges. Redemption is only partial; read independently, many of these stories cross the thin border that separates gentle lyricism and pointlessness. They need to be read in tandem; as accompanists, not the main players, in the scheme of his work.
Each story is a small slice of life; many subtly evoke the subterranean shifts in a traditional world creaking into a version of modernity. Some work because of a glancing reference, easy to miss but impossible to forget once seen. "The Party", on the surface no more than a vignette of a man looking for signs of approval in a conversation with the bored son of his boss, gains significance when you realise that it's set against the background of the Emergency. The indifference of the characters to the history taking place outside the walls of their houses, clubs and offices is a novel in itself. "White Lies" could have been no more than an accounting of the complex relationship between a musician and his rich client, where he is at once guru and hired hand. Instead, it gains depth from its evocation of the different levels at which music might have meaning — as a fashionable skill, as a calling, as a trade, as a minor or major passion.
If Chaudhuri labours in the Calcutta stories under the shadow of James Joyce, it is because he deliberately summons Joyce's shade. "Even more provincial, and marginal to Europe, than Dublin was in the early twentieth century, was Calcutta at the century's close. Trams, rickshaws, markets, office buildings with wide, creaking stairs, bookshops, little magazines, literary critics, uncles, aunts, created this Dublinesque metropolis." Chaudhuri's Calcutta — even his Bombay — is, like Joyce's Dublin, imbued with the conflict between loving a city while trying to capture its claustrophobic provinciality. The search for escape engrosses his characters, as young boys play riffs from a borrowed music on their guitars and dream of Levis jeans, as intellectuals read a motley set of foreign writers, as a couple attending a shraddha of a suicide seek normality through small talk and the comfort of rites.
But Chaudhuri lacks Joyce's passion — there are no epiphanies here, just a series of muted moments. He also lacks Joyce's ability to conjure characters across the whole spectrum — relating a domestic servant's trials is as much of a departure he can make from telling the stories of the middle and upper classes. Dubliners was a classic, a milestone in the career of the young Joyce. Real Time is an appendix, not devoid of interest, but no more than a brief stop to allow the author to catch his breath before he moves on to greater things.
Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence, Amit Chaudhuri, Picador India, p.184, Rs.395.
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