A tale of ordinariness

[1]

For an author promoting his latest book, Amit Chaudhuri sets an unhurried pace. A day after Calcutta: Two Years In The City, was launched in Mumbai, the acclaimed writer’s agenda for the morning was to look around the bookstores in a city that was once home. I see Mr Chaudhuri — a tall, casually dressed man with a fringe of salt and pepper hair that nearly brushes the top of his spectacles — at the Kitab Khana store, and he agrees amiably to cut short his tour and settle down in the in-house cafe for a chat.

He admits that Calcutta has been a long time in the writing. His agent suggested the idea in 2005, but it was only in 2007 that a conversation with the poet Utpal Bose made Mr Chaudhuri think that he might have found something to write about: “I thought I couldn’t write about Calcutta because I’d already written about it in three different books... the first two books I wrote about the city, A Strange and Sublime Address and Freedom Song, were in their ways, celebrations of urban life. That city which had excited me so much didn’t exist anymore. But then the conversation with Utpalda made me think, who are the people who live in this post-bhadralok city? And in 2009, I started writing, as life was happening to me, and life was happening to Calcutta.”
Writing about Calcutta represented a kind of escape — from the expectation that Indian writers in English must write epic, pan-Indian narratives. “I was writing in that post-Midnight’s Children era…and a lot of writers during that time were looking at the larger historical questions about being from South Asia or being from India — and I never wanted to do that,” says Mr Chaudhuri. “In Calcutta, with its multiple divergences and affiliations and associations, what excited me was that so much could be contained in the ordinary. What interested me was the neighbourhood, how much you take in the world, how much you leave out the world, and how much filters in anyway — those things become metaphors for the way such cities have been transformed by the larger world.”
In choosing a different narrative, Mr Chaudhuri also eschewed the “sights, smells and sounds” kind of writing that had become synonymous with a lot of Indian English language fiction. “When you think of ‘sights, smells and sounds’ you think of a slightly exoticised landscape in which these are what you’d expect them to be. But when you’re describing physicality, object and memory, then the things you’re evoking may not be the expected ones. They may be aspects of the ordinary. When I was writing A Strange and Sublime Address, Calcutta ‘sights, smells and sounds’ were supposed to be defined by Mother Teresa, by the poor. But I remembered it as a place of ordinariness: A place where the garbage dump and the poet and the book on the bookshelf… all existed,” he explains.
As a chronicler of the ordinary, Mr Chaudhuri has been called an “observer”, but he thinks of himself more as an experimenter with form. And as a poet, writer and accomplished musician (he learned to play the guitar at the age of 11) his experiments aren’t articulated through the written word alone. “Being multidisciplinary is like being multilingual. Arun Kolatkar said, ‘I keep a pencil sharpened at both ends. One end is for English, the other is for Marathi and neither end knows what the other is up to.’ So you have to be alert to what you are and when the opportunity comes up, be either the Marathi poet or the English language poet.”
Conversation, and coffee, at end, I leave Mr Chaudhari in the bookstore and I can’t wait to read what he has to say about this city, in a book that he says will be part memoir, part novel.