In a way, it feels unnecessary to review this novella, because Colm Toibin’s Foreword already did such a good job of reviewing it, very comprehensively and in the most complimentary of terms. The novel’s protagonist is Bombayite Sandeep, 10 years old, and who makes 2 visits, in summer and in winter, to visit his relatives in Calcutta. He watches them eat, sleep, talk, pray, go about their daily routines, with keen interest and delight. This novel is also a love song to Calcutta, seen through the eyes of Sandeep, a visitor to the city.
At such times, Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason. […] Daily, Calcutta disintegrates, unwhispering, into dust, and daily it rises from dust again” (p11).
The novel is not one with a plotline as such; it is mostly Sandeep’s observations, experiences, sensations, of normal domestic life, in the bosom of his extended family, and in a particularly Calcutta-flavoured setting.
In the evenings, people came out on the balconies in the lane: widows in white saris, housewives with children in their arms. The men returned home, slowly. Sandeep and his cousins sat on cane stools on the verandah, watching the balconies on the opposite side, each with its own characters, its own episodes. (p23).
The charm of the novel is very much in the evocative quality of the writing. Scenes are vividly painted, and it feels like a description of something seen and known by the author, rather than conjured up only in the imagination. The description of washing by hand in the bathroom is quite vivid:
Saraswati would wash saris and sheets, tedious yards of cloth, beneath the running tap, sitting fixedly on her haunches, rubbing the clothes, banging them repeatedly with a loud watery ‘pluff’ on the floor. As she banged them, the bathroom echoed with a strange rhythm. Later, she would wring the saris into long exhausted pythons of cloth (p7).
Some episodes are so beautifully described, and which must occur and recur endlessly, in so many parts of the world. For instance, when they all go to visit older relatives, it is a long drive and they pick up some little gifts, before arriving at the house.
Once they were inside, Mamima gave the pot of yoghurt and the pot of sweetmeats to the old lady ‘There was no need,’ she said. ‘Oh really,’ she said. ‘This is too much,’ she insisted, with the air of someone who has just been given the Kohinoor diamond as a birthday present. ‘Come, come, come,’ said Chhotomama, with the air of someone who has just given the Kohinoor diamond as a birthday present, and refuses to be overawed by his own generosity. ‘It’s nothing.’ It was nothing, of course, only Ganguram’s sweets and yoghurts, but they fussed and fussed and created the illusion that it was something, something unique and untasted and unencountered (p75).
Such scenes are enacted exactly with this very tone and texture Chaudhuri describes so well, with all the cordialities and courtesies exchanged almost formally, certainly ritually. Chaudhuri goes on the describe how the younger members of the house come out to touch the feet of the elder visitors, while the visitors try to stop them,
’Oh no no no’ said Chhotomama, struggling to keep the son’s hand away from his feet. ‘There’s no need for all this.’ This was half a token gesture towards modesty, and half towards the new, ‘modern’ India – Nehru’s secular India, free or ritual and religion (p75).
The lovely ebb and flow between the less ceremonious contemporary expectations, and the old ways, are beautifully captured in this recounting, as Sandeep looks on in wonder at the oddities and apparently contrariness of adults.
Toibin’s foreword points to the innocence and experience of Sandeep, and to the way his act of noticing makes sense of the scenes, and gives meaning to them. However, he seems to read Chaudhuri’s novel as representation, but it is surely not an unbiased representation in its nearly somnolent acceptance of the order of things. For example, the depictions of the household include servants, such the live in servant, Saraswati, who washes clothes while everyone else rests during the afternoon heat, and whose sleeping places seem to be the most uncomfortable in the house. There is mention of a sweeper, and a janitor, but no comment at all on how the middle class household functions so comfortably because of the services of all these others who are as much taken for granted as the furniture might be. They are appreciated, well treated even, as valued furnishing would be, but regarded only in terms of their service and utility in a very class-based consciousness, which comes across as being very accurate, but which is framed in a very benevolent manner. There are times when Chaudhuri’s pen may slightly run away with him, such as when the Muslim janitor’s children come to their house to watch a Sunday film.
He noticed, from the corner of his eye, how her bright and ragged body ran impulsively down the stairs, and listened to her slightly hoarse, illiterate voice calling to her brother and sister to follow (p63).
How can a voice be illiterate? Her choice of words may signal a lack of education, though being literate is not necessarily the same thing, but nevertheless, how can a voice sound illiterate?
However, for most part, Chaudhuri’s novella is a beautifully rendered symphony of observation, memory, and textures of Calcutta, a certain period, a certain place, and a certain class angle. When Sandeep’s uncle falls ill, the descriptions of how the family’s rhythm changes and the visits to the hospital and the back and forth that goes on comes across as being socially choreographed, as beautifully as any dance ensemble, and yet so instantly recognisable to the rhythms of many an extended family in the same situation. Overall, the novella is a beautiful read. It is short, which is good, because it goes nowhere, but it is enchanting in its own way, like a bubble poised perfectly for a fleeting moment, beautiful partly because of its very transience.
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