City of Dust

The common vision in these brief evocative novels is Calcutta: teeming, decayed and putting up only a feeble modern resistance to its gradual deliquescence back into the brown dreaminess of the Bengal plain.

“Calcutta is a city of dust,” Amit Chaudhuri writes. “If one walks down the street, one sees mounds of dust like sand dunes on the pavements, on which children and dogs sit doing nothing, while sweating laborers dig into the macadam with spades and drills. The roads are always being dug up, partly to construct the new underground railway system, or perhaps for some other obscure reason, such as replacing a pipe that doesn’t work with another pipe that doesn’t work. . . .

“The old houses, with their reposeful walls, are crumbling to slow dust, their once gleaming gates are rusting. Dust flakes off the ceilings in offices; the buildings are becoming dust, the roads are becoming dust.”

Chaudhuri evokes the sweet decorousness of a way of life that came to terms with the dust; one that has no place in a contemporary India whose efforts to replace dust with dynamism, he suggests, leads simply to faster entombment. His three novels tell of a number of middle-class families whose networks of ceremony and assurance, carried through several pre- and post-independence generations, have begun to fray.

Each of the three novels is written as a kind of mosaic: a series of brief, detached scenes, none conclusive or developed in itself and assembled in seemingly random order. In “Afternoon Raag,” for instance, most of which tells of several frozen years spent by a Calcutta youth at Oxford, his arrival there is related only at the end.

The skewed arrangement can seem arbitrarily decorative and unnecessarily perplexing, and there are times when Chaudhuri puts more effort into adorning than evoking. When a family sits down to a dish of chiles, snapping each one before eating it, “each made a sound as terse as a satirical retort.” This is in the earliest novel, “A Strange and Sublime Address,” and it is clearly a youthful overindulgence of an exquisite gift for imagery. In the next two books, the gift is exercised with greater restraint.

“Address” relates a vacation spent by Sandeep, a little boy from Bombay, at the home of his aunt and uncle in Calcutta. The contrast between the two cities is deftly woven in: bustling Bombay, where the boy’s enterprising father works and the family lives in a fine apartment, and the languorous loveliness of Calcutta.

It is a summer of long afternoon naps, leisurely conversations and gossiping, visits and evening drives. Sandeep’s uncle is a man of elegant stateliness and a poor head for business. The family is in decline; the ancient automobile the uncle drives to work--often it takes much of the neighborhood to give it a starting push--dies, and he must rely on public transportation in the blistering heat. Returning in the evening, he orders a glass of iced water, swallows it in a gulp and applies the frosted surface to his forehead and ears. “Aaah,” breathe Sandeep and his little cousin, watching.

Sandeep’s aunt brings a small offering each day to the figurines of the various gods, arrayed in their niches like dolls in a dollhouse. “Prayertime,” the boy thinks, “was when adults became children again.” On a visit to relatives, the uncle ceremoniously presents a small pot of sweets; they thank him as effusively “as if he had given them the Kohinoor diamond.”

“Come, come, come,” retorts the uncle, speaking “with the air of someone who has just given the Kohinoor diamond as a birthday present and refuses to be overawed by his own generosity.”

The theme of decline is only lightly touched on, although it is unmistakable in a later visit, when the uncle has suffered what can only be called a grandiloquent heart attack. Mostly, it is the golden quality of the remembrance that bespeaks loss: This, after all, is what gold has always suggested, from the Stoics to Robert Frost.

“Afternoon Raag,” though set mainly in Oxford, is nevertheless a second Calcutta novel. This is so less in the narrator’s Calcutta flashbacks and flash-forwards than in his present absence. He spends his time in a dreamlike detachment; he studies, goes to lectures, explores the town, has affairs with two Indian students. But he never breaks free from his native city; the picture postcards in the Oxford tourist shops seem more real to him than the place itself.

The point is made, often effectively, but it makes “Afternoon Raag” the least interesting of the three novels. The mosaic pieces are too gray to move us to assemble them.

“Freedom Song,” the last novel, lacks some of the bubbling freshness of the first one, but it has a compelling intelligence and moments of striking beauty. The story of two middle-class families, it is set in the present, and the theme of decline and loss is set out with great clarity. What seem like dozens of characters, related closely, distantly and sometimes not clearly (Chaudhuri occasionally mistakes vagueness for suggestiveness) struggle, visit, gossip and remember.

If there is a central figure, it is Khuku, the middle-aged wife of Shib, a retired executive who has been hired by the government to try to revive a once-successful chocolate factory it has taken over and run into the ground. Khuku carries out her family duties, all the while--an Indian Mrs. Dalloway--wondering and meditating and, in the process, registering the portents and tremors of her world.

A nephew is a worry because he has become a Communist, thus making it harder for a suitable wife to be found for him. His mother, Khuku’s sister-in-law, broods about her family’s gradual impoverishment. It is a time--the early ‘90s--of militant Muslim demonstrations and, among the gentle middle class to which Khuku belongs, a slow rise of reactive anger and an impatience with the governing Congress Party for indulging them. (An impatience that will eventually contribute to the defeat of Congress by a nationalist Hindu party.)

Shib, struggling philosophically with a hopeless task, finds in Little’s Chocolates a parable of Calcutta’s decline. Founded by the British, the factory was taken over by an enterprising Bengali. After his death, his heirs quarreled, and the state took it over and ran it at a perpetual loss with a grossly padded payroll. Ostensibly reformist, a new administration hired Shib to make drastic changes but proved unwilling to provide him with the necessary funds and political backing.

All these things and many others run through Khuku’s mind. She welcomes a visit by an old schoolmate; it will allow her to live emotionally in a past whose coherence and orderly sweetness have been lost. When Mini, the friend, goes home, Khuku feels bereft, “as if she had visited her childhood home and was once more exiled in adult life.” Chaudhuri has written, erratically at times but with persuasive resonance, of an older India of family ties and shaped ceremony exiled into contemporary formlessness.