Nom de Plume

For me, India on vacation is like life in abeyance. It’s not just the surrealism of a long journey in which beginning of the trip seems lifetimes away, or the strength-sapping heat, or even of adjusting one’s clock to “Indian time.” No, it’s a dusty smell of spices and burning cow dung, the absolute foreigness of people that share your same blood.

Chaudhuri captures this sense meticulously.

Jayojit Chatterjee and his son, who live in the States, return to Calcutta for the summer vacation. They stay in his parents’ apartment. His father, the Admiral, is now retired and they live quietly, so every action, every word is magnified. It through this microsopic view that we begin to see the cross-section of lives. Jayojit is getting divorced. He wants to spend time with his son Bonny. The Admiral observes. The mother fusses. Beyond this, however, is a keen sense of a man who has lost his footing in his native country, and the book ends when he returns to America.