Amit Chaudhuri

To me, this book read as a love song to Bombay. Amit Chaudhuri and I appear to have lived at a similar time and seen Bombay through very a very similar lens - that of an upper middle class child and then young adult, not completely belonging, given the transient nature of the family ties that brought us there, yet in some ways belonging no place else in the world. His descriptions of Malabar Hill, Kamala Nehru Park, that lookout over the city from up top, Marine Drive, Churchgate, Colaba and the Taj, the long corridor in the hotel that leads to Joy Shoes, passing by the Chinese restaurant - these are all memories that are etched in my mind, too, and revisiting them through this book is what kept me turning the pages.

[But if this book is about friendship, then that friendship is painted in very subtle and faded colours. I did not feel that I understood Ramu very much better through the pages. Rather, the narrator and his family seemed to be the ones that constantly bubbled to the center, while others drifted in and out of the edges.]

Amit Chaudhuri has the amazing ability to evoke a mood. Years after I read Afternoon Raga, for example, I remember little about the actual story, but I remember the feeling it evoked. I suspect that I will feel the same about this book.… (mehr)

I bought this book at a very low price in a library sale, otherwise I would never have got hold of it.

It is mostly about an Indian family living in India, Apurva and Mallika Sengupta and their son Nirmalya. Practically nothing happens in the book except that Nirmalya at one point moves to Britain.

They are a musical family and the parents are apparently quite well-known and gifted as regards their singing.

I found there to be several significant problems with the book.

Firstly, I was not acquainted with any of the Indian forenames and found it difficult to distinguish between male and female names. When a forename ended in ”a”, not knowing any better, I assumed that it was a female name; but this often turned out not to be the case.

Secondly, innumerable Indian (Hindi?) terms were used, often without translation; there were perhaps hundreds of these words/terms used. The book was apparently intended only for Indian readers. There should absolutely have been an index of these words/terms at the end of the book to give us non-Indian readers a slight chance of finding out what was going on and what the characters were saying to each other.

Similarly, there were many musical terms used, terms I had never previously heard of, and there should have been an index of these too.

The writing was good, and, amazingly, the book was quite readable and I got through it to the end without really understanding half of it.

I will definitely not be reading any further books by this author, even if I should be offered them for free.… (mehr)

A narrator named Chaudhuri has become a well-known writer after schooling in England. Periodically, he returns to his former home in Bombay for book fairs and readings of his latest novel. His friend, Ramu, from his school days, has not been so successful. The narrator and Ramu meet in Bombay and revisit the places and neighborhoods of their youth. ..places I gladly looked up when reading this absorbing book. Some places where they wandered were just the same and some had changed. The Taj Hotel, the location of the 2011 terrorist attack, became a spectral character in itself.
I admired Chaudhuri's writing for its restraint and its ability to weave in so many threads of time, family, and love of place. I felt I was with him all the way. When I finished the book I let it settle in a few days and then read it again.… (mehr)