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Paddyfield.com
More reviews by Christopher New
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence by Amit Chaudhuri
REAL TIME: STORIES AND A REMINISCENCE is this talented author's fifth book and his first short story collection. Thirteen of the stories were first published in various literary magazines; two others, and two verse pieces which constitute the reminiscence of the subtitle, make their first appearance here.
The stories are nearly all set in what the publisher's blurb fatuously if modishly describes as post-post-Independence India (are we to be saddled with post-post-post Independence India soon?), which spans roughly from the nineteen seventies to the present day. Chaudhuri is an acute and ironic observer of this varied scene, though not -- how could he be? -- of all of it.
He does not confront the harsher realities directly, preferring an oblique perspective of them through their indirect effect upon his characters' lives. In The Great Game, two policemen watch a cricket tournament in Dubai upon their Bombay television screen, and spot the celebrated suspect in some lethal bombings amongst the dignitaries in the stands. A passing glimpse, no more -- they have the cricket to watch.
Mr and Mrs Mitra, in the title story, are more concerned with protocol niceties, business, gossip and their lunch than with the suicide of the distant relative whom they have come to commemorate. In The Party and Old Masters, the relationships between friends and colleagues whom success and failure in the corporate world are drawing apart are charted with a delicate melancholy.
In the longest story, White Lies, a gently humorous view of a businessman and his wife emerges from the depiction of their relations with the wife's singing teacher, who knows his principal function is to tell white lies about her ability. The lives of most of Chaudhuri's characters are, in words I adapt from another story, "monochromatic and dull, with light like a suggestion."
This does not of course make the stories themselves dull. The best are enlivened with telling phrases and perceptions, and I was at times reminded of Dubliners, although Chaudhuri has two cities in view (Calcutta and Bombay), not one.
But not every story is as appealing as the best. Those dealing with the gods read almost like exercises, and it is doubtful whether the verse pieces will enhance Chaudhuri's reputation. Stricter editing would have avoided some blemishes which, however minor, should not have occurred in the text of an author of Chaudhuri's quality ('He looked at the woman attach clips,' for instance).
And the author's penchant for piling up clauses between subject and verb, which works fine when it is in character -- as in Prelude to an Autobiography -- but not when it isn't, as in a seven-line sentence about Anita Reddy in The Great Game, thereby frustrating comprehension on first reading, if indeed not on the second and third, is sometimes disturbing. (If you had trouble grasping that sentence on first reading, you will know what I mean.)
These are minor flaws in a work which is generally a pleasure to read. Chaudhuri is an adroit and sympathetic observer of the frailties and foibles of middle class urban India, particularly upwardly, or downwardly, mobile businessmen and their families, whose lives, as one of them puts it 'were glamorous and happy, but too trivial.' But in one story, The Man from Khurda District, he deals sensitively and deftly with the grittier realities of a sweeper's family's life in Calcutta. It would be good to see him go further and deeper into some of those troubled currents that move below the glimmering surface of so many of his characters' lives.
Christopher New
12/10/2002
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