Spaces Between Us

As a chronicler of the mundane, Chaudhuri confessed to his interest in the comical. The unlikely source materials of his novel are the epic Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses, particularly the myth of Odysseus and his son Telemachus, which he interprets through a leisurely jaunt along London’s streets by Ananda and his uncle. “I have an affinity for daydreamers because there’s something deeply melancholic about them. There’s also something comical about melancholia… I like to look at the way the two converge,” he said.

Jha also spoke of the importance of good editorial advice in shaping up a novel. “As an editor, my job is to look at stories and see what works and what doesn’t. As with a story, as with life, you need a third eye. I don’t see myself doing anything without a second pair of eyes,” he said. Chaudhuri, who considers his tutor at the University College of London, Dan Jacobson, and Karl Miller, founder-editor of the London Review of Books among his first critics, however, confessed to relying more on his own sense of editorial propriety. “My first most valuable editor is myself and the second most valuable one is my wife,” he said.