The unbearable Bengaliness of being

This was not the only way to go, but author Upamanyu Chatterjee still chose to saunter down a cliched corner

We have been here before. In an old house, held together by sepia-tinted nostalgia, the glue of habit, and a father and a son at odds with, but helpless without, each other. The father, half-paralytic, awaiting death, the son, a recluse doing his bit for his old man for lack of anything else to do: so reminiscent of films and novels from Bengal of a certain era where the boundaries of the courtyard encircled a cosmos.



Then there are other things that make Upamanyu Chatterjee's Way To Go uniquely Bengali in ways only readers from the state will relate to. The way, for example, Monga, the local builder who has been eyeing the old house, is depicted. In communist Calcutta, men with money were looked at with derision. In Chatterjee's book, Monga gets similarly stereotyped, "with his square, flattened bald head -- like an old tinny five paisa coin -- his sunglasses, gold cigarette lighter and tight black clothes, he did indeed look diabolical in a Bombay underworld sort of way. Mentally... distinctly less Occidentalised".u00a0u00a0

Or the obsession with maid servants. "Jamun's (the son) sex life dwindled to a sort of dry, rotting peanut. It was hurried, silent, stinking, and gave more dissatisfaction than pleasure to its participants. Kasibai (the maid) and Vaman (her son) typically looked annoyed at being roused from sleep and throughout the dozen-odd minutes with Jamun, made it clear with their scowling and sleepy expressions what they preferred to have been doing."

Such passages, between Jamun and the maid servant or the builder's mistress, work in favour of Chatterjee's critics who have been disturbed by the grotesquery in his writing. Take this line: "He then sat down in the chair that Parmeshwari had vacated and wriggled his anus about to roast it in the warmth that she had left behind."
Or this conversation between the maid and Jamun when the latter telephones her. "What have you called me here for? You want to lick my c*nt on the phone! You contact me here once more and I'll send my man all the way up to stuff that mouth of yours with a c*ck that you won't be able to resist."

Jamun's unremarkable life changes after his father goes missing, refusing to meet death in the expected way, calm and accepting and lying down. From then on, it's about how he reconnects with his brother Burfi in that old home of theirs and the only child he has.

Making degeneration look poetic has been an old Bengali pursuit and Chatterjee succeeds in certain passages, but the book as a whole fails to reclaim the lost honour of the writer of English, August.