Book: Sojourn
Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Price: ₹499
Writing in Indian-English or Indo-Anglian literature, as it’s often called, has come of age for long. Moving away from long sentence constructions and an air of borrowed discomfort, today’s Indian English is a language that stands on its own. Amit Chaudhari is a name to reckon with in this genre, especially as someone who believes in “transfiguring the mundane” as he himself called it in a column for The Telegraph (“The East as career”). “A novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer and music composer” is how Wikipedia describes him, and while Chaudhuri has made significant contributions to each of these genres, they all come together as motifs creating a voice that is contemporary and, yet, rooted.
Beginning with A Strange and Sublime Address, Chaudhuri’s writing has shown his readers the importance of lucidity of language. An uncanny aura of loneliness, the feeling that we readers are actually intruders into a private soliloquy, is a cultivated art of Chaudhari’s. His novels are essentially urban and the crisis is that of a twentieth-century city-dweller.
Sojourn, with its short sentences and note of self-dismissal, advances the same technique of writing found in his earlier novels. Throughout this slim volume, we have this sense that something is about to happen. Time has a meandering quality and the writing assumes an unhurried pace. Small, insignificant incidents become part of the storytelling, lending Sojourn a peculiar breeziness that lingers throughout. Sharing a coffee or buying a jacket, such mundane incidents find place in Sojourn so that nothing seems to be out of place. “Introductions weren’t necessary” in Sojourn. There is no war to be won, no great journey to be undertaken, no heroine to be rescued. The book almost urges the readers to take a deep breath and let go of expectations. The best metaphor for Sojourn is probably the poem Faqrul recites on “deshlaier kathhi” or matchstick. Everything in the novel is ordinary and, yet, everything can add up to create what is Life.
The plot revolves around the impressions of an unnamed protagonist who arrives in Berlin on a prestigious assignment — a visiting Böll professor. This is his second encounter with the city, which makes it neither familiar nor completely unknown. The opening sentence sets the mood: “It was evening and I didn’t know the name of the road I was taken to. It was as if I’d woken from a sleep:” This dream-like state hangs like a cloud over the entire book. As the narrator navigates this dream world, bizarre, precise details create a lasting impression: “My office had a telephone and a computer and table, and a view of other windows”, or “On my breezy way back, my eyes caught, among the rows of coloured tablets, a DVD of Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham.” Such images linger, creating a sense of odd familiarity.
Characters are woven in casually in the matrix of the novel. Be it Geeta Roy and her husband or Jonas, all of them are fleeting. Faqrul, a friendly Bangladeshi poet who lives in exile, takes it upon himself to give our protagonist company. Among the characters, his is the strongest.
The idiosyncrasies of Faqrul grow upon us as they do with the narrator. All relationships are tackled through food. Food, after all, is an important theme in all of Chaudhari’s novels. Sojourn is not an exception. He describes every meal, whether it is breakfast, lunch, tea, or dinner, in painstaking detail. The description of the dishes or the way they are served and eaten creates a moment of suspended stillness, erasing the public-private boundaries in the novel. “There was a wave of food: chicken bhuna, daal, pilau rice, tandoori prawns.” Or “A heap coloured by parmesan and pesti, mixed with fettuccine.”
However, as we proceed, the protagonist seems increasingly lost in a city that not long ago was two cities, each cut off from the other. The new, unified city carries memories from the divided past but is yet to settle in on its new identity. Deserted airports and gloomy winter add to the persisting dream-like quality, which has settled on this new city that is neither new nor old.
The protagonist has a short encounter with a woman, Birgit, but even that relationship amounts to no earth-shattering romance. ‘In absentia’ seems to be a recurring pattern in Sojourn. What begins with missed landmarks or the lack of a common language in a regular conversation between the protagonist and his cleaner climaxes to far intense moments like Faqrul’s disappearance or the narrator’s blackouts on the streets. People are worried. The protagonist confesses, “I’ve lost my bearings — not in the city; in its history,” he thinks. “The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.” But does he? He falls back to the unquestionable anchor of human life: “I have my routines.”
The book is like the journal of an ordinary life, making it resonate with its readers. Every experience in Sojourn is temperate: “not pleasant or unpleasant”. For in either case anything too significant “would break the spell”. The 76 pages can belong to each one of us, trudging along trying to find a grand narrative in one great adventure.
