Book review: Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseus Abroad is more about moments than characters

The novel, in Amit Chaudhuri’s hands, is a singular thing — not a marshalling of plot and characters into a narrative, nor is it a web of relationships as much a string of moments. In his work, time slows down, and a place is rendered in vivid detail. Like Ananda, a character of his new novel, he is moved by the curious subject of 20th century literature: “modern man…with his retinue of habits, like getting on to buses, secreting the bus ticket in his pocket, going to the dentist”. And while there are no revelations of passionate intensity in his novels, no conflicts arrived at or resolved, in the best ones, the texture and rhythm of ordinary lives come alive, and the reader departs, more alert to the invisible life of objects, rooms and streets.

The day and its passage, its interruptions and detours, its river of sounds and its flowing shapelessness shapes Chaudhuri’s sixth novel, Odysseus Abroad. On a summer day in London, Ananda, a young student of English literature re-reads a Shakespeare sonnet, steps out of his digs at Warren Street, pays his rent, meets his tutor Nestor and makes the journey to Belsize Park to meet his uncle. They voyage out together on London’s streets, this walk a palimpsest of older journeys that the two have taken — and an allusion to the myth of Odysseus and his son Telemachus. The epic Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses are “the source material” the author has played around with in the book. If a Homeric warrior, or even the epic mode, seems an odd inspiration to a novelist of the quotidian, Chaudhuri points out how the epics too are full of miniature moments. “In an epic frieze in Mahabalipuram called Arjuna’s Penance, for instance, the artist has, [amid many other scenes] telescoped onto a pair of monkeys, one picking the lice off the other’s head,” says the author, over lunch at a Delhi club.

Wry and unexpectedly funny, this novel about two men and their companionship seems to draw its charge from the city that Chaudhuri creates with delicate precision: the curry restaurants run by Bangladeshis, the streets springing with the joy of Jamaican music; the metronome-like swing between “Sorrys and Thankyous” covering the day in an ever-repeated dance. This is the London of the Thatcher era, and Indians and Pakistanis have gone from being “black” to “Asians”— “it is not yet” says Chaudhuri, “a city of the super-rich.”

Ananda and his uncle, Radhesh or Rangamama, are unlikely heroes — both peevish, self-important but lonely men, at odds with the life around them. The former aspiring for the “Olympian, the Parnassian: especially getting published in Poetry Review”; the latter, a person with not very exacting standards of hygiene, under whose bed stood bottles, “which made unnecessary that trip at two in the morning to the shared loo in the hallway”; and who has never had sex because of the fear of contracting syphilis.

But Rangamama “had embarked on his great journeys in the forties and fifties — Sylhet to Shillong, Shillong to London, and from being a school matriculate …to a chartered shipbroker”. The thought of a modern, if unremarkable, Odysseus struck Chaudhuri a few years ago when he bought a sketch by F.N. Souza of a man who had a striking likeness to his uncle in London. It was titled Ulysses. “And it struck me that he is an Odysseus-like figure. He had made these journeys alone, from a large family to a place without family. He had decided to exile himself. You think exiles are imposed on you by the gods or fate but they are often created by yourself. And Rangamama had authored his own life himself. He had made the journey towards great success and ambition, and then withdrawn from that,” he says.

While writing about his uncle, he was reminded, he says, of the German critic Walter Benjamin, who, like Rangamama, was born under the sign of Saturn: “a sign of delays, detours and impediments”. “Susan Sontag in an essay talks of people born under the sign as drawn to objects more than people, as fumblers and ditherers. And in this, I saw my uncle and myself, melancholic but also comic characters,” he says.

In a Greek tragedy, one hears only the sharp, undiluted note of loss. But an epic is a wider, more expansive genre, accommodating the many hybrid notes of life. Uncle and nephew talk about Tagore and Keats, about rituals of food and toilet — “his uncle would drink ten glasses of water to cleanse his organs and send the waste within …to its bigger journey” — and the hierarchy of “small jobs” and “big jobs”. In their peregrinations, they often sit down to eat, or talk about what to eat. Watching a Bond film, Rangamama asks his nephew what they would have done in such scrapes. The conversations between “two heroes with bodily functions” is how the novel mulls the question of masculinity and male friendship. “Are we heroes? That was one of the questions my uncle would ask in his throwaway remarks,” says Chaudhuri.

In a wonderful passage, typical of the novel’s simultaneity of experience, Ananda, urged by his uncle, sings a Tagore ditty, awakening in his uncle a memory of a girl, a garden, and unspoken love. The narrative seem to arch towards a story of pathos, before it is yanked back to the testy ground of their conversation: “Did you have sex with her?” But this is a novel of affirmations. They return to their Ithaca, the “caricatures of epic voyages” over, laden with a box of laddoos and sated by a nourishing meal. When it’s time for Radhesh to depart, Ananda thinks: “Never say, I’m leaving. Always, I’ll be seeing you.”