The manifold pleasures of listening: Amit Chaudhuri’s “A Strange and Sublime Address”

In the 2001 preface to the Collected Stories of Saul Bellow, his wife Janis described how her husband called her a “genius noticer”. She later attributed the same quality to Bellow, after seeing the legendary author at work. “When he is on to a story, his capacity for hearing and absorbing details expands exponentially.” That work-in-progress became The Bellarosa Connection, a 102-page novella which, while not being a masterpiece, does showcase quite a bit of his close attention to detail, as well as other Bellow hallmarks: musical, rhythmic prose, startlingly funny, unpredictable metaphors, serial digression and not much by the way of plot.

Although he is a very different kind of writer from Bellow, all of the above can be safely said about Amit Chaudhuri’s 1991 debut novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, almost equally slim at 109 pages. The novel, an account of two summer vacations spent in Calcutta by its protagonist, a young boy named Sandeep, quite deliberately avoids conventional plotting, and chooses instead to focus on something else: capturing a time and a place in history, not through pretentious allegories, attentionseeking linguistic experiments or other contrived literary hi-jinks, but through a meticulously crafted, synaesthetic brand of prose which is like no other in contemporary Indian writing in English.

A departure from the constraints of a plot-driven narrative isn’t merely a stylistic or formal device for Chaudhuri; the author is making a larger statement here, about the wisdom of “jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives and the life of a city, rather than a good story.” Chaudhuri isn’t denying us the ‘real’ story just because he doesn’t like to write that way, it is his authorial belief that one way to reconstruct the things which matter about a character or a group of people, is through the ones which apparently don’t. In the words of the author himself, “The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.”

The novel starts off with a string of absolutely gorgeous passages about Calcutta, the most confounding megapolis of them all; random slices of life, which are tenderly evocative without once descending into cliché or banality. Chaudhuri’s unique gift as a novelist is perhaps this; to weave the elements of memory, perception and sensual experience into narrative in a quiet, unobtrusive manner. An old grey Ambassador, (which is the car we know as the ubiquitous yellow Calcutta taxi) wages daily battles with its owner, Chhotomama, Sandeep’s uncle. “It was battered like an old cardboard box, and the needles on the dials on its dashboard never changed direction, the futile compasses always pointing north. When it ran, the engine and the ramshackle body of the car combined to make a grating, earthy noise, like a drunk man cracking an obscene joke in a guttural dialect and laughing at it at the same time.” The smell of mustard oil, another quintessential Bengali preoccupation, triggers an affectionate tribute, at once culturally accurate and aesthetically superior.

“In Bengal, both tamarind and babies are soaked in mustard-oil, and then left upon a mat on the terrace to absorb the morning sun. The tamarind is left out till it dries up and shrivels into an inimitable flavour and a ripe old age; but the babies are brought in before it gets too hot, and then bathed in cool water. With their frantic miniature limbs and their brown, shining bodies, they look like little koi fish caught from the Hooghly river, struggling into life.”

The above passage is a particularly apt example of that distinct quality possessed by Chaudhuri’s writing: a profound stillness, an almost preternatural calm as the author trains his eye on the city and the infinite little stories to be told therein. To convey an entire experience with any reasonable degree of authenticity (or even to share but a moment of it with all its emotional and sensual implications) requires an act of authorial alchemy, for lack of a better term. The writer has to transcend the limitations of his medium, in order to say, convey a very precise hue of color, or just how tangy a lemon felt using nothing but words; as an author, one has to bridge that gap between the written word and the sensory self. At their best, Chaudhuri’s descriptions leave the reader in a state of suspended animation; their beauty depends on, and is enriched by, the reader’s ease of visualization.

To that end, it helps that Chaudhuri pays more attention to sounds than most writers. (In addition to writing and teaching Comparative Literature, the author is also an acclaimed singer in the Hindustani classical tradition, most recently composing and performing an experimental music ensemble called This Is Not Fusion worldwide) In Chaudhuri’s world, the radio “babbles like the local idiot”, while the pages of the newspaper “crackle with festive intensity”. Clearly, the author is inviting us to listen very closely indeed. Equally attuned to the sounds of his own language, he gleefully declares, “Chhotomama’s shelves were full of these books: Sarat Chandra, Tarashankar, Rabindranath; like the names of wines, the names of these authors; an entire generation had been drunk with these names.”

In Sandeep, Chaudhuri has a protagonist who, like the author, is a Bengali kid growing up in Bombay. Coming from a megacity with a very different set of sensibilities, Sandeep views Calcutta as an object of limitless wonder. Being Bengali, and not actually from Kolkata, gives him a tantalizing mixture of the outsider’s amused detachment at the human circus out there, and the instinctive sympathy of someone who has a latent connection with the culture. Consider this passage about a Sikh taxi driver’s attempts at speaking Bangla:

“The Sikh spoke a courteous Bengali to the women, made still more courteous and comically elaborate by the fact that it was spoken in a broad Hindustani accent and according to the rules of Hindustani grammar. This gave the gentle, rounded sounds of the Bengali language a masculine openheartedness; it even made the language smell of onions and chappatis. Flattered and impressed, Mamima and Sandeep’s mother giggled like schoolgirls.”

When Sandeep notices the comically accented Bangla spoken by the driver, one wonders if he mightn’t perhaps be thinking of his own failure to read or write the language spoken by his family. The aforementioned “distance” (whether cultural or otherwise) between Sandeep and his uncle’s family also helps him to pick up on subtle hints about Chhotomama’s financial problems, or his grandmother Chhordimoni’s true nature, which she cloaks with a crabby, uninviting exterior. In his gradual, unhurried development of plot using steady accumulation of details, Chaudhuri reminds one of the Japanese-English writer Kazuo Ishiguro, who, like Chaudhuri has had his fair share of detractors using the “nothing-happens-for-so-long” line of attack.

Amit Chaudhuri is a rare breed indeed among English-language writers from India. His works have nothing in common with the type of postcolonial narratives which took off from where Rushdie ended. There is none of the terribly compulsive wordplay, much of it involving Indian English, that hydra-headed monster. Far from rejecting the social realism and the incorrigibly sensuous side of the great modernists like D.H. Lawrence, (Chaudhuri is also the author of a dissertation on Lawrence’s poetry) in favour of pastiche, magical realist or allegorical settings; Chaudhuri whole-heartedly embraces these virtues of the masters of yore. In the introduction to The Picador Book Of Modern Indian Literature, which he edited, Chaudhuri talks about literature from India being typecast in this manner:

“Rushdie’s style, robustly extroverted, rejecting nuance, delicacy and inwardness for multiplicity and polyphony, and moreover, the propensity of his imagination towards magic, fairy tales and fantasy, and the apparent non-linearity of his narratives- all these are seen to emblematic of non-Western modes of discourse, of apprehension, that is at once contemporaneously post-colonial and anciently, inescapably Indian.”

Chaudhuri himself is one of the strongest counter-voices in this discourse, a bona fide original in a sea of indistinguishable voices. In his subsequent novels like Afternoon Raag, or most recently, The Immortals, he has realized the promise that his first novel so amply displayed. For the sake of symmetry, we shall turn, once again, to Saul Bellow in order to better comprehend the effect that Chaudhuri’s writing has on the reader who cares to listen:

“I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”