Streams of consciousness in a foreign land

Nothing much happens in Odysseus Abroad, Amit Chaudhuri’s latest novel, his sixth. Ananda, the protagonist, gets up, in the morning, potters about his London studio flat, makes tea, does riyaaz, walks down to his professor’s lodgings for a tutorial and then to his landlord’s restaurant to pay rent, before taking the Tube to see his uncle, Rangamama, in the suburbs. Later, Ananda and Rangamama walk down to Hampstead, have tea and muffins at a teahouse, and take the Tube to back to London, have gulab jamuns and return to Ananda’s flat. They leave again to have dinner at Gurkha’s Tandoori, before Rangamama leaves to go home at 11 p.m. and Ananda tucks in for the night.

The action, set in the time span of a single day, is everyday but its mundaneness is offset by the chatter inside Ananda’s head. Random thoughts on his noisy neighbours upstairs, poetry, Greek and Indian mythology, Bangladeshi restaurants and Sylheti waiters, Gujarati passengers on the Tube, philosophical musings on race and sexuality, on people on the streets, his parents and Rangamama and their stories and motivations, politics, recent events such as the Live Aid concert at Wembley stadium and so on. The soliloquy, play of thoughts that take the narrative forward by association, and punctuated by sharp, irreverent asides give an insight into the capricious consciousness of a lonely, rather sheltered 22-year-old Indian male student of English literature in London, whose persnickety thoughts are on their way to being fixed into an irreverent aesthetic.

Chaudhuri has always excelled in animating the drama of an individual consciousness rooted in a certain place and milieu. Chaudhuri’s novels abjure drama, the grand historical or sociological superstructure; the autobiographical has been his preferred mode, mining memory, personal history for narrative matter. In Odysseus Abroad, too, the external details of Ananda’s life coincide with Chaudhuri’s -- Ananda like his creator studied in University College London in the 1980s, grew up in Mumbai to upper-middle class Bengali parents, had irksome neighbours. Presumably Rangamama, too, is based on his own uncle, whose comment on a Souza charcoal sketch that Chaudhuri had bought, “You paid Rs.55,000 for this? You may as well pay me for farting”, set him off on the train of thoughts that resulted in this novel. “The sketch was called Ulysses. So I began to think of my uncle as Odysseus and began to think how that would work.”

But Odysseus Abroad is also, in many ways, a different novel from the kind that Chaudhuri is wont to write. There is, for one, its overt literary superstructure -- an ambitious take on Homer’s epic Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses, doffing its hat at Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway along the way. Then the element of irreverence, of fun tending towards hilarity is a refreshing addition to Chaudhuri’s narrative mode.
Take this passage about Ananda’s habit of reading poetry while sitting on the pot. “Poems of a certain duration, even obscure ones, like Geo ffrey Hill’s ‘To the (Supposed) patron’, he finished in the duration of a single crap. He then reread it, suspended over the submerged stool. He’d emerge from the bathroom in a strange mood, physically unburdened and spiritually, mentally, elevated.”
Chaudhuri, of course, is quick to deny that Odysseus Abroad marks a new beginning in any way. “My interest in place continues, my interest in language continues, my interest in bodily functions continues. In A Strange and Sublime Address, the uncle, I call him a water-closet thinker, goes to the toilet, smokes a cigarette and signs: ‘Bohe nirantara ananta anandadhara (The stream of happiness flows constantly, eternally)’. And then in Afternoon Raag, I have that bit about the mother’s constipation, Isabgol and then release. I’ve always been irreverent but now it is much more sustained. The book is also playing around with Ulysses and the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, there’s a section in which Leopold Bloom goes to the toilet, sits above his rising smell as James Joyce puts it.”

gargi.gupta@dnaindia.net; @togargi