When we read writer Amit Chaudhuri's latest offering Friend of My Youth (Penguin India), we see these questions emerge from within his incandescent prose, like tiny fireflies, lighting up
Amit Chaudhuri
Can The city be your friend? Can its people teach you to love and hate, at the same time? Can its roads, nooks and crannies leave you yearning for more each time? When we read writer Amit Chaudhuri's latest offering Friend of My Youth (Penguin India), we see these questions emerge from within his incandescent prose, like tiny fireflies, lighting up. Because, at the heart of this book, which on the surface is a candid account of the writer-narrator's relationship with his childhood friend Ramu, we also notice a slow lament about a city, in this case Mumbai.
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There was a time when Chaudhuri was a 'Bombayite', long before the city became Mumbai. The writer was around a year old, when his parents moved from the surreal rhythm of Kolkata to the posh artifice of Kamala Nehru Park in Malabar Hill. He went on to study at the Cathedral and John Connon School, and attended college at Elphinstone before finding his raison d'être in literature, and shifting to Oxford in the mid-80s.
Chaudhuri, who shuttles between the UK and India, doesn't deny any of the confessions he makes about Mumbai, in his book. "I wasn't happy in the city. It made me uncomfortable," he says. "I wanted to leave that life," adds the writer, who is also professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, UK.
In the book, the writer revisits the Taj Mahal Palace hotel post the 26/11 attacks, recalling how the place had changed post the incident
Yet, hidden between the chapters is a friend that the writer appears to be slowly reconciling with. This friend is both 'metaphorical' and 'real' — the latter being Ramu whose character Chaudhuri admits to have fictionalised in parts in this semi-autobiographical narrative. The book begins with Chaudhuri revisiting Mumbai for a reading of his novel The Immortals (2009), a year or two after the 26/11 attacks. On arriving, he learns that his friend won't be able to meet him because he is at a rehab centre in Alibaug, fighting a drug addiction. From here on, we see the writer look for excuses to visit the city again, sometimes on the pretext of readings, on other occasions, research. Why? "There were three things that were converging in my head," he explains. "The first was returning to the city, where you have grown up and where you now live in hotel and club rooms, because it's no longer your home. The second is the idea of the friend from that city, who is the one person from the narrator's childhood, whom he still keeps in touch with and who is suddenly, unavailable. The third is revisiting the Taj, and seeing it seemingly in this pristine condition, untouched and bustling, when just some time back, it had been utterly destroyed."
A lot has changed since the writer's parents moved back to Kolkata in the late 80s, permanently severing ties with the city of Chaudhuri's childhood. "I grew up in corporate Bombay. Obviously, the mad spiralling of money did not exist then, but, it was still an oasis, a make-belief one," recalls the Sahitya Akademi Award winner. But, the writer always remembers being wary of this privilege. "I saw it with a degree of reservation," he recalls.
This love-hate for the city translated into a more affable bond when he began visiting Mumbai in the late 90s and the early turn of the century. He became more aware of the sights and sounds of this place, whether it was the narrow gullies of Apollo Bunder, or the back-alleys of Kala Ghoda and Ballard Estate, to eat seafood at Trishna's or beri pulao at Britannia & Co. Then, there are places like Joy Shoes, located inside the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, mentioned in his novel The Immortals, which the writer keeps coming back to first because of his mum and later his wife, who won't wear shoes from anywhere else. His scooter-riding school friend Ramu, whose name we presume has been changed, becomes one of the many wheels to help him see the city differently. "Today, Mumbai suits me greatly," he admits, jokingly adding that he desperately waits for someone to invite him here.
"I now recognise that I didn't know the city as well as I thought I did. My relationship with this place is like that of a friend, whom one has known for many years and is still to discover. It's confrontation, continuity and discovery at the same time," he ends.
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