Allude to classics

“In 2001, I brought an FN Souza charcoal sketch of Ulysses (Roman name for Odysseus, the Greek King of Ithaca, in Homer’s epic poem, Odyssey) for Rs 55,000 and put it up in the drawing room of my Kolkata house. My uncle was visiting us then and he looked at the painting and said, ‘You paid Rs 55,000 for this? You might have paid me the same amount for farting!’ He then added that the work produced by a genius and a child often looks the same,” says Amit.

And while he made this statement, the author found an uncanny resemblance between Odysseus and his uncle. He says, “For a man who had earned a lot of money working as the manager for a shipping company in the UK, my uncle was rather content to live in a London bedsit (a room and a kitchen), for close to three decades, without marrying or coming back home. Like Odysseus, who took 10 years to return to his island after the fateful Trojan War, my uncle was a warrior and a wanderer in his own life but also someone who has been lost.”

And Amit’s own journey from Warren Street to his uncle’s place at Belsize Park during his undergraduate years, felt like the one Telemachus (Odysseus’s son) had embarked on to find his father. “I wondered if it was possible to structure a novel on such a convergence. So I let the idea stay with me for 10 years and began working on the novel only in 2012. I first started writing it as a memoir but that didn’t work. So I began to structure it in my head as episodes from the beginning to the end of the Odyssey and then it began falling into place,” he informs.

Odysseus Abroad, Amit Chaudhuri’s recently-released book is about a young man and his uncle making an appointment to meet on a particular day on July, 1985 in London. And it’s about that day when “nothing happens yet something happens” which echoes on the lines of Homer’s Odyssey.

Amit, whose novel is also a kind of parody of James Joyce’s Ulysses feels that there is no sacred or canonical text which one couldn’t touch as a point of reference. “The impulse I get while looking at another text is to express through it something about the human condition and to also say that there are no sacred texts which we couldn’t reach out to. And everything ultimately converges with the non-sacred, which is the life you lead of eating, reading, desiring… loving,” he says.

The author’s last book was a non-fiction, Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013), but he insists that while writing, he prefers to eliminate the divide between fiction and non-fiction. “For me there is just one kind of writing which is imaginative writing. It’s not as though when I am writing non-fiction I am providing a lot of facts and figures, which is what people usually think non-fiction is about. On my part, I am always curious to interrogate this boundary between life and art.”

“It’s not as if life happens and then you write about it, because when you write you are also producing a way of looking at life. As to whether writing creates life in a way or it is life that provides material for writing. So, that is what absorbs me when I write. My interests lie in streets, neighbourhoods and buildings and all the things which comprise an urban space; where human beings are not the center of the world but an element in the landscape,” he adds.

Amit, who is a professor of Contemporary Literature in the University of East Anglia in Norwich has been conducting creative writing workshops for the university in Kolkata for the last two years. He says, “In the last 20 years, generation of writers had come into existence who felt that literature was important but it was more vital to address big questions of history. And literature was secondary to these questions. But it is nice to discover new writers, whose works are much more literary, proving that the world of Indian writing in English is always going to be heterogeneous.”