I am drawn to a sense of strangeness in the familiar: Author Amit Chaudhuri

By Sukant Deepak

New Delhi, Sep 4 (SocialNews.XYZ) In his world, 'home' in its emotional physicality is not only fluid but evolves into an inner language slowly as the pages turn -- and is always just a grasp away.

In author Amit Chaudhuri's latest novel 'Sojourn' (Penguin), the sense of homecoming the narrator experiences in Berlin points to the fact that the word 'home' has no fixed meaning. "People, on reading my first novel, 'A Strange and Sublime Address', would congratulate me on the fidelity with which I had written about North Calcutta. I would say to them, 'But it's not North Calcutta; it's the South!' 'Really?' they would be puzzled. 'Which part of the South?' 'Bhowanipore'. 'Ah,' they would say, smiling. 'Bhowanipore is the North Calcutta of the South.' I am drawn to a sense of strangeness in the familiar -- and that is inadvertently reflected in the wording of the title of my first book. Freud had a beautiful German word for this strangeness: unheimlich; 'un-homelike'," says this recipient of Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, Commonwealth Writers' Prize and most recently Infosys Prize for Humanities-Literary Studies.

In fact, he returned to this paradox more than once. In 'Afternoon Raag', the narrator remarks that the room that students lived in when they arrived in Oxford was their 'first friend'. In 'Friend of My Youth', referring to the way we refer to hotel rooms as 'home' when we travel, the narrator says that 'home is where you go to bed at night'.

His latest work centres around an unnamed man who arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. He befriends Faqrul, an enigmatic exiled poet, and Birgit, a woman with whom he shares the vagaries of attraction. He tries to understand his white-haired cleaner. Berlin is a riddle -- he becomes lost not only in the city but in its legacy. Sealed off in his own solitude, and as his visiting professorship passes, the narrator awaits transformation and meaning. Ultimately, he starts to understand that the less sure he becomes of his place in the moment, the more he knows his way.

Chaudhuri, who was also a visiting professor in Berlin from the autumn of 2005 to early 2006 stresses that the book, however, is not the story of that visit.

"It's the one that emerges from my dwelling on intimations and questions I first had on that trip. For instance: Why does Berlin, ostensibly a foreign city, seem familiar? If it is indeed familiar, what is it that someone like me might be remembering -- and what is it that they recognise -- when they encounter it? Also, what is it that they have forgotten so that they presumed Berlin was a foreign place, and not home?"

This author of seven previous novels, one non-fiction and a number of books of literary criticism has always frowned at categorisations. For him, non-fiction does not mean a documentary recording of fact as opposed to, say, the making up of things that fiction denotes.

"It is in fact any form of writing liberated from or attempting to be free of, the constraints and conventions of fiction. Of course, the most compelling fiction too wishes to be free of those constraints. At this point, you begin to see how categories like 'fiction' and 'non-fiction' begin to seem less useful.

A Hindustani classical musician too, Chaudhuri was initially reticent about revealing that to his readership. He felt that the idea that a writer could also be a serious musician would be met with scepticism and maybe even hostility.

"My first two novels were published in 1991 and 1993; my first two recordings of 'khayal' were released by HMV in 1992 and 1994. I only began to mention my music in my bio note in the jackets of my books in 2007, after I had begun a project 'This Is Not Fusion' and was urged by friends and other musicians to share this bit of information with my readers. Until then I led, at least in this regard, a double life."

A writer, poet, musician and critic, one wonders if he is 'everything' when working on a single discipline too.

"When I write, I don't think of music; when I do music, I have no memory of being a writer. But the kind of writer and musician I am, are related by temperament and overlapping idiosyncrasies and predilections," he says.

Chaudhuri, an introvert, spent most of his time with his parents or musicians during his early years with his initial years in London also being isolated, his relationship with the world does not seem to have changed drastically over the years.

"In Calcutta, to which I returned after moving back to India from Britain, I still live in greater isolation than I would like to. However, I am related to projects to do with the city -- like the conservation of its historic architecture, for instance."

For a writer like him, much connected to the 'physical' city, the pandemic-induced lockdowns gave him a chance to stop travelling every few weeks and stay at home over periods he had not experienced in one place since childhood.

"I could observe the seasons changing in Calcutta and marvel at how subtle these changes were," he concludes.

(Sukant Deepak can be reached at sukant.d@ians.in)

Source: IANS