Glossing over it

My Mirror column:

The real-life story of Anand Kumar and his free coaching is incredible, but Super 30 feels like a missed opportunity.

A still from Super 30, directed by Vikas Bahl. 

“Kya baat hai bhai, ki film hamaari aa rahi hai toh sab log lag jaate hain? [What's going on, bhai: is everyone piling on to me because a film is coming out?]” asked the renowned engineering coach Anand Kumar during a video interview to BBC's Hindi correspondent Saroj Singh in January this year. The biopic he was referring to released last week, but it answers few questions -- not even Kumar's own.

Directed by Vikas Bahl (known for Queen and for the serious #MeToo charges against him that led to the dissolution of Phantom Pictures in 2018), Super 30 stars Hrithik Roshan as the Patna-based Kumar, who shot to national fame a decade ago, when all thirty students in his Super 30 class 'cracked' what might be the world's most competitive entrance examination: the Joint Entrance Examination to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT JEE).

Every year since 2002, Anand Kumar has selected thirty students from underprivileged families for his free coaching, also providing them free lodging in Patna and home-cooked meals. How Kumar arrived at this vocation is a fascinating tale. In the early 1990s, Kumar's handwritten submission to a UK journal of mathematics was followed by an offer of admission from the University of Cambridge. The backward caste son of a poor postal clerk, Kumar couldn't arrange the money. Then his father died, and he spent some years in penury before finally hitting his stride as a teacher. The idea of using his abilities to improve the lives of talented poor students like himself came later, and their continued success has been his, too.

It isn't unusual for Bollywood (or for that matter, any commercial film industry) to pick a big star to play a real-life hero. Many recent biopics have done it: Farhan Akhtar as Milkha Singh, Priyanka Chopra as the boxer Mary Kom. Others have cast a known face who's also a good actor: Nawazuddin Siddiqui has appeared as Urdu writer Manto, Shiv Sena politician Bal Thackeray and everyman road-building hero Dashrath Manjhi, while Irrfan Khan was superb as the runner-turned-dacoit Paan Singh Tomar.

But there seems to me something about Super 30 that outdoes these previous instances. I do not refer only to the blackface that Bollywood unabashedly carries out in the name of make-up, literally covering the taller, more muscular Roshan's fair skin and light eyes with an artistic tan. I mean also the way that Bahl's film covers over the facts of Anand Kumar's life.

What's strange is that the facts of Kumar's life are already full of drama. Interviewing Anand Kumar for his 2013 book A Matter of Rats: A short biography of Patna, the US-based writer Amitava Kumar wrote, “When Anand describes the events... you watch his tale of woe unfold as if in a black-and-white Hindi film possibly made by Raj Kapoor.” The fact that his father's sudden death took place by choking, that the streets around their house were flooded by rain, that he had to put his unconscious father on an abandoned vegetable cart to wheel him to a clinic – all this is in Amitava Kumar's book. But in the film, there is no choking, no flooding, and Anand has a bicycle. The film depicts the papad-selling business that his mother and he supported themselves on, but there is no mention of the fact that the postal department sent Anand 50,000 rupees after his father's death, or the fact that he needed to stay on in Patna to support a family that included a grandmother and a disabled uncle. It almost feels like the facts are too extreme for the film.

Instead, Bahl's version wishes to distract us with not one but all of the following: a youthful love interest who marries another man (Mrunal Thakur, from Love Sonia); a hard-drinking journalist who makes confusing interventions; an overly villainous coaching competitor (Aditya Shrivastava); a buffoonish politician (Pankaj Tripathi). Worse, it gives us a whole first batch of Super 30 students, some with 30-second backstories that could be potentially devastating – the manual scavenger, the construction labourer, the girl with the alcoholic father -- but not one gets a real personality. The camera is so focused on Roshan's as-ever exaggerated performance that the kids don't have a chance.

Attempts have, in fact, been made on Anand Kumar's life. But the film makes these about overly chatty hitmen, and the last episode – where his coaching competitor plans to blow up an entire hospital in order to wipe out the Super 30 – has the students turning Kumar's science formulae into a bizarre combination of religion and magic. A Vedic chant about vidya is the aural backdrop to an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors to outwit armed goons. Meanwhile the villain warns: “It should look like a Naxal attack, no-one should suspect that it is meant to kill Anand Kumar, otherwise he'll become a martyr.”

The BBC interview is filled with allegations it thinks are controversial. How many students does Kumar take on in his (paid) Ramanujan classes? What fees do those students pay? Why does he not reveal the names of each year's Super 30 students until the IIT JEE list is out? Kumar answers them all, though he sounds victimised.

The film, meanwhile, refuses to even engage with the last decade of Kumar's life, involving the complexities that come after the Happy Ever After. We dearly want our heroes to be saints, and we are happy to erase their real selves to achieve that.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 July 2019.

Interview: Is fiction-writer Siddharth Chowdhury creating a new literary form?

An interview with one of my favourite contemporary writers, the inimitable Siddharth Chowdhury, for Scroll:

‘I see my individual books as part of one big novel that I am working towards.’

Siddharth Chowdhury's first published book was a short story collection called Diksha at St. Martins (Srishti, 2002). Some characters who first appeared in those stories, like Ritwik Ray and Mira Verma, went on to play starring roles in his next book, the brilliantly unpredictable Patna Roughcut (Picador, 2005). 

Chowdhury's next novel Day Scholar (2010) saw a shift of setting from 1980s Patna to 1990s Delhi, with a new narrator called Hriday Thakur opening up a deeply male world of Bihari hostellers who live on the fringes of Delhi University and in the terrifying shadow of Zorawar Singh Shokeen, political broker and property dealer—and their landlord. 

His most recent book, The Patna Manual of Style (2015), is a set of interlinked stories that returns us to Hriday's world a few years after Day Scholar with Chowdhury's usual comic acuity.

Chowdhury's fiction combines a joyful political incorrectness with deep affection for the characters who populate his world, the idealist, the eccentric and the downright dubious. He is possibly a combination of these things himself. He is also quietly holding out against the onslaught of everything 21^st century publishing tells writers they should do to gain readers: Facebook, Twitter, book launches and litfests. We agreed on an email interview, but he prefers to write by hand, and so I received his handwritten (photocopied) responses by courier. A couple of follow-up questions were answered on SMS.

Both your recurring protagonists Ritwik Ray and Hriday Thakur share their Bengali-from-Patna past, their Delhi University present and their writerly ambitions with you. What's easy and what's difficult about using autobiographical material?

The trajectory of my novels and stories is autobiographical. But autobiography can only be a take-off point for the imagination to soar, I feel. So 90% of my fiction is pure storytelling. Fiction is the only medium through which I engage with the world. So a lot of other elements—politics, social commentary, various axes to grind—seep into the fiction as I go about stringing the reader and myself along. In the first draft I rarely have a clue where the story would take me. By the second draft things become clearer. The difficult thing is when readers start imagining that all of it is autobiographical. But I have realized over the years that, too, gives pleasure to some readers.

In The Patna Manual of Style, Zakir Hussain College and Delhi University's English departments are populated with professors who teach at these places in real life, some thinly disguised, and some named. You once said that your parents in Patna tell people who ask that your books are “out of print”. How have friends and acquaintances who have read your books responded to becoming characters in them?

My friends and family rarely become characters in my fiction. Once in a while I would introduce a real person to establish locale or atmosphere, and more often than not it is meant as a tribute. So it is with my teachers in Zakir, like Lima Kanungo and Anuradha Marwah, or Vikram Seth or Sujit Mukherjee when I talk about publishing in 'Death of a Proofreader'. I never introduce a real person in my stories to spite them. Using real people or institutions also imparts a sense of hyper-reality and leavens the more fabulist elements in my fiction.

The wishes of my parents have now actually come true. Both Diksha at St. Martins [his first short story collection] and Patna Roughcut are out of print. Day Scholar will be, too, if Picador doesn't bring out a paperback soon.

How do you name your characters?

Very carefully. I collect names. I like names with a bit of vajan, as they say in Patna. With the right name half of your work is done. It is like casting in movies. Sometimes I feel I could have been another Lynn Stalmaster.

Your characters often live inside books and films, from Javed “would have been a friend of Ghalib's” Siddiqui in the first story in Diksha at St. Martin's (2002) to Ritwik Ray in Patna Roughcut kissing Mira Verma “how James Dean had kissed Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause”. This carries on into The Patna Manual of Style: Hriday's girlfriend from Dhanbad (named Charulata, like the Satyajit Ray film) reminds him of Supriya Chowdhury in Meghe Dhaka Tara (a Ritwik Ghatak film); a Patna girl is named Sophia after Sophia Loren in Marriage, Italian Style and haunted by the film all her life; even Jishnu da, importer of blondes, expresses his angst by reciting the poetry of Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar'. Other characters write imaginary books -- Lawrence Lytton-Mobray's Purulia-set detective stories, Anjali Singh Nalwa's Tarn Taran, or my favourite, Ritwik Ray's Mao for the Misbegotten – but are described as reviewed in real journals, like EPW and Biblio. Is this all just your own fiction-haunted mind writ large, or do you really know a lot of people like this?

Well, I do know a lot of people who want to write, or to act or to direct movies, but have chosen to do something else for a living. Of course most of them have artistic ambitions without the requisite talent. But it is a good thing. I don't mock it. I like writers and write about their world. It is an abiding theme. So to me an unpublished writer is as important as a published one.

Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar' is a Patna speciality, and I, like many others of my generation, can quote him in chunks. It is like Pushkin and the Russians.

I know how hard it is to write a halfway-decent poem or a story, so writers would always have my compassion. But in the end, it is all fiction, the wisp of blue smoke curling away from my mind.

What books have been your strongest influences? And anything you read lately that you were struck by?

Well, Philip Roth, Hemingway, Arthur Miller, the early Naipaul, Salinger, Jack Kerouac have been significant influences. Lately I have enjoyed The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri a lot.

What do you re-read?

I re-read the collected stories of John Cheever, the first 49 stories of Hemingway, parts of Anna Karenina and A Sportsman's Sketches by Turgenev once in a while.

Your books have always declared your cinephilia. Do you have favourite filmmakers, or genres, or eras? Would you ever write a film script? And important side question: did world cinema trivia really impress Patna girls?

Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Saeed Mirza have been huge influences. I also like the early stylish Godard, Sam Peckinpah, Billy Wilder and John Ford. I love cinema across genres. Also I can sit through anything by Scorsese, Tarantino and Woody Allen. I am sure I have missed out on twenty other names. If there is a special preference, it would be American cinema of the 1970s. Those magnificent Easy Riders and Raging Bulls.

No, I wouldn't write a screenplay, as cinema is a collaborative medium, and I am a lone wolf by inclination and training.

My experience is that the easiest way to lose a girl's attention is to talk to her of world cinema or literature. But then I rarely meet the right kind of girls.

Ah, that question was inspired by the narrator in your long-ago story 'A Scene from Class Struggle in Patna' who says his movie trivia is good only for quizzing and impressing girls. But that will teach me to stop imagining that all your narrators are autobiographical!

Moving on: your characters – even the exceptionally literate, film-society-going ones – inhabit a world that's often violent, sometimes sleazy. Did you ever fear your readers might be repelled?

Some readers are always going to be repelled by the world I portray. Many are also bored stiff. But there is a tiny minority which will sit through anything that I write. God bless them.

One of the things that has always made your writing stand out for me, at least within Indian English fiction, is how frankly you deal with the presence of caste – its networks, stereotypes, battles – and the presence of sex. “A woman who shouts "Jai Mata Di" or "yes please", or better still, "aur tani jor se" in throes of sexual congress, is worth pages of description of the furniture in the bedroom,” as you once put it. Did/does this unfetteredness come easily to you?

No, the unfetteredness does not come easily. It shouldn't either. As starlets in India traditionally say, they would wear a bikini if the role demands it, so it is with me. I will do the swimsuit round if the role demands it. Otherwise I am a wallflower by nature. As for caste, it really can't be avoided if you are writing fiction in India.

Is Delhi a kind of exile from Patna, for your characters? And for you? Do you feel part of a Bihari cultural diaspora?

In some ways, yes, it is kind of like an exile. But then I do Delhi also. I seriously started to write only when I came to Delhi University.

Do you hang out with other writers? Do you discuss your writing with anyone while it's happening?

I am afraid I don't hang out much. I do not have the time. My first reader is usually my wife. Sometimes I do share my finished work with Pankaj Mishra and Amitava Kumar. Pankaj especially has been a great support over the years.

You don't do the litfest circuit. Do readers ever write to you? Any interesting responses?

Sometimes I do get emails. Mostly of hate, but once in a while of love, too. In Chandigarh, at the only literary festival that I have attended, I was accosted by two ladies who said that they had come all the way from Canada to meet me. Turns out they wanted to meet Siddharth Chowdhury the painter. Talk about taking a wrong turn.

You have a day job in a publishing house. What does your work day look like? Does the publishing life intersect with the writerly life?

I think my day job as a publisher certainly enriches my writing. I get to read a lot of stuff I wouldn't normally pick up otherwise.

I believe you do all your writing by hand. How does the rewriting and editing happen?

I usually write the first three drafts of all my stories or sections in a novel by hand. With yellow Staedtler pencil on small spiral bound notebooks which I carry everywhere in my satchel. The fourth draft is usually typed out by my wife when she finds time. Afterwards I tinker with it for months on the computer, mostly working on the timing. For instance, the two stories that book-end Patna Manual, 'The Importer of Blondes' took over two years to write, 'Death of a Proofreader' close to a year.

You've published two story collections and two novels. But Patna Roughcut, for instance, though called a novel, is as much a series of episodes about overlapping characters, as The Patna Manual of Style, called 'Stories'. If publishing didn't need these categories, would you describe your books differently?

I see Patna Roughcut, Day Scholar and The Patna Manual of Style as part of one big novel that I am working towards. In that sense it is unfinished. Readers can read it in any way they want. As individual stories or short novels which are part of a larger whole. As long as they get it, it is fine by me. Labels are anyway only a marketing tool. I am meanwhile working on a long story about Sudama Pathak of Patna Roughcut, called 'The Prince of Patna'.

Published in Scroll.

Book Review: A Matter of Rats

My review of Amitava Kumar's most recent book, in Biblio.

A Matter of Rats—A Short Biography of Patna
Aleph Book Company,
144 pages, Rs 295

The first book I read by Amitava Kumar was Bombay-London-New York (2002). I read it in New York, where I spent nearly four years as a graduate student: a Bombay-born Dilliwali wondering if it was possible to turn oneself into a New Yorker. My conclusion: it was possible, but not what I wanted. I thrilled every day to the unmatchable urban sparkle of New York, but it wasn't home. And I had long ago made a subconscious decision that I would go back home.

Perhaps it is easier to go home to Delhi than to Patna.

In Bombay-London-New York, Amitava Kumar described his journey out of Patna, and the journeys of other Indian writers in English, such as VS Naipaul. These literary journeys provided the occasion for a series of watchful autobiographical vignettes. It is an acutely perceptive book about books, but also a deeply affecting meditation on place: on leaving home and coming back, trying to belong and refusing to belong. And yet, though it traverses the three cities of its title and more, the subtitle -- “A literary journey” -- made clear that it was really about travelling (or staying put) in one's head.

A Matter of Rats, Kumar's most recent book, comes with the beguiling subtitle 'A Short Biography of Patna', leading one to expect a book about place. But this is more a book about people: those who live in Patna, and those, like Kumar, in whom Patna lives.

As a writer, Kumar has always been an attentive listener, and yet also put himself into his narratives in ways that risk our judgement. I think, for instance, of his description (in BLNY) of his first meeting with Mausaji and Saras Aunty, an uncle and aunt who had left Patna for the US when he was two. When they first show up at his door in an American university campus, he is “delighted”; he seems to mark how young and elegant they look, how foreign. Later, he realizes that they have spent a 'successful' life in America by freezing themselves and India at the moment that they left it: they have never been back in two decades, and yet they only watch Hindi films from the 1950s and 60s. He describes Saras Aunty saying that when she closed her eyes, she could see India. Writing about this, Kumar confesses he had the unkind desire to say to his aunt, “You need to open your eyes.”

In A Matter of Rats (henceforth AMOR), Kumar has properly become the NRI. A very different sort from his aunt and uncle, no doubt – a successful writer in a post-liberalisation world, whose work and connections bring him back to India oftener than they could have dared imagine. But an occasional returnee nonetheless. If in BLNY, Patna is remembered with astonishing candour as the site and shaper of a sexually-repressed male adolescence, in AMOR it is almost entirely a place that has been left behind. Even when he does place himself in the narrative now, as for instance in a school reunion of Patna old boys held in Delhi, he seems to want to displace his presence amid the scandalous reminiscences and “the luxury that surrounded us” by constantly looking at the face of the waiter behind the bar, “the only one not drinking”. The waiter remains impassive. The past seems dimmer, and the shape of the present is difficult to discern.

It is a strangely tentative book, and somehow the less satisfying for it. To provide just one example: in 2002, when Kumar described “the paltry evidence in my life of the aesthetic”, or “[T]he absence of all matters literary”, he was characterising not just his own childhood in Patna, but something of the city itself. In 2013, even though he zeroes in (quite rightly) on “the explosion of coaching institute culture” as “one of the true stories of Patna”, Kumar allows himself a mere line of speculation on whether it marks “the end of education”. He does not take this further. Instead, his narrative leapfrogs across a whole city full of ordinarily desperate tuition centres and lands on a much-feted Patna success story – IIT coach Anand Kumar and his Super 30: thirty students handpicked from poor, rural families whom he provides with free board and tuition. As Kumar himself points out, the amazing IIT enrolment levels of Anand's Super 30 are well known in Patna and beyond, a story has even appeared in the New York Times. This does not by any means make it ineligible for comment. But I would have liked to hear more about the teaching space beyond a one-line reference to the legendary “shed with a corrugated roof”. I would like more about Anand's teaching style, and much more from the students themselves. We do hear brief tales of struggle from two or three students. But barring the unforgettable phrase “meow-meow English”, which Anand uses to caricature the sort of IIT aspirant who might ordinarily make his poorer, more Hindi-speaking students feel insecure, we get no sense of their inner lives. Later, Kumar closes off his own incipient criticism of rote learning by blandly quoting Muslim students at a Super 30 spin-off called Rahmani Super 30 on their desire to represent their community.

But why end the story as it always ends, with the imagined 'fulfilment' of the IIT dream? What about the experience of those who have actually gone on to the IITs? Has life had for them the rosy afterglow promised by “the flag of fulfilment” on which Kumar closes his tale? If this sort of reporting is an unfair demand, I would at least have liked to hear what Kumar, an avid Hindi film watcher, made of Aarakshan, a big-budget 2011 Bollywood film about SC/ST reservation and the commercialisation of education, centred around a fictionalised version of Anand Kumar played by Amitabh Bachchan. Bachchan reportedly learned “teaching skills in mathematics” from Anand for this film directed by Prakash Jha. Jha is a Bihar-born filmmaker who is indubitably among the state's most influential cultural representatives, having made several star-studded Bollywood films, most dealing with the crises of a non-specified Bihari present. The fact that he only gets a mention in AMOR for his earliest work, Damul, other than being dismissed by a leftwing poet for having built “Patna's first and only mall”, makes me wonder. Especially from Kumar, who has written so astutely of the relationship between cinema and life in India in his novel Home Products, this sort of absence feels like a deliberate cop-out.

Sadly, this is a book full of absences.

Caste, which whether we like it or not is the engine of most social, political and economic life in Bihar, is foregrounded only in the first chapter about the Musahars, an 'untouchable' caste whose very name marks them out for disdain as 'rat-eaters'. Kumar's earliest memory of meeting a Musahar does involve the recognition that his upper-caste grandmother would not allow a Musahar child into the house in Patna even as a servant. But we hear almost nothing of the upper-caste consciousness of caste – which is, if anything, likely to be stronger than among the Musahars who would like nothing better than to shed it. There are two moments when we get a glimmer of how real conversation in Patna is imbricated in caste – one where the aforementioned left-wing poet is described disparagingly by an unnamed sociologist friend as “an upper caste Bhumihar poet who has only written two-and-a-half poems”, and another when a doctor at Patna Medical College laughingly explained a patient's injury as the result of the doctor concerned being Scheduled Caste. But Kumar chooses to move on quickly. There is nothing in this book to indicate how caste networks now operate at the high and middle levels of the system, driving everything from marriage and jobs to political alliances and the cash-flows of corruption.

For a book about a city, we get alarmingly little sense of neighbourhoods, or even how the broad geographical contours of the city map onto the social. Names like Gandhi Maidan and Boring Road appear and disappear, but there is no neighbourhood that comes to life. The only time the reader experiences the street life of Patna, it is via a Hindi short story called 'Ath Miss Tapna Katha' in which we see a young woman's journey to college through the eyes of a character called Nimmo. It feels ironic when Kumar writes, however accurately, of “[h]ow many mohallas and how many lives disappear inside one wretched column written by an outsider in The Daily Telegraph.” And somehow Kumar's awareness of “his outsider's eye” does not help matters. The crazy excesses of Bihar's present appear in parenthesis, as if they are cruel jokes: the invigilating nun asked how she can call herself a Christian if she doesn't show compassion for the cheat, or the book about Patna's antiquity which, translated into Hindi, becomes 'authored' by senior bureaucrats. A whole chapter about the leftwing poet's marital life is perhaps meant to gesture to a Patna masculinity, but one aches for something less glancing, less oblique.

It is not necessary to inhabit a place to understand it. But unlike Home Products or BLNY, where Kumar's thoughts from afar were embedded in a richly developed compost of the past, AMOR (even while often drawing on passages from BLNY) offers thin pickings. Where Kumar does succeed occasionally is in giving us some sense of his changing relationship to his own past. “I told stories about Patna because they were part of my shame at having come from nowhere,” he writes. “It took me time to learn that what I thought of as honesty, the honesty required of a writer, was also a rejection of who I was.” In a superb discussion of the Naipaul brothers and their “wilful negation” of their imagined Indian past, Kumar writes, “Such an act of complete rejection, sparing no one, can be life-giving... You are free to speak your mind.”

One wishes, then, that Kumar had decided to stop hanging on to quasi-insider status. Some day, perhaps, there will be another Patna book in which he will feel free to speak his mind.

Published in Biblio (Sep-Oct 2013).

Book Review: Siddharth Chowdhury's Day Scholar

Brilliant Tutorials: my review of Siddharth Chowdhury's new novel, in Biblio 

On the face of it, Siddharth Chowdhury’s Day Scholar, is a coming of age novel. The book’s own inside cover actually describes it as a “crazed and profane coming of age tale”, whose plot is ostensibly about how Patna boy Hriday Thakur (“who hopes to be a writer some day”) is first “trapped… by a series of misjudgements” and later “saved from a terrible end”. But much like Chowdhury’s previous offering, Patna Roughcut (also billed as “a story of love, idealism and sexual awakening” that takes us to “the heart of an aching, throbbing youth”), Day Scholar – despite a self-referential moment when its protagonist is asked by his father about how his Bildungsroman is coming along – is not a book that seems containable within the neat boundaries of the coming-of-age genre.

This is not necessarily a criticism. While there are those who might be baffled by the freewheeling air with which Chowdhury moves in and out of the lives of several different characters, or even feel cheated out of the readerly pleasure afforded by deep identification with a single protagonist, he has an admirable ability to weave what may seem like disparate anecdotes about several kinds of kaands into a seamless narrative. (“Kaand”, for those not party to the often sublime pleasures of Hindi, is a word that can translate into something as neutral as ‘event’, or acquire as vast a sense as ‘catastrophe’.) He is a master of the shaggy dog story, often going off on long-winded tangents that seem entirely unpremeditated – until you realize that he has managed to entirely shift the emotional register of his narrative within the space of a paragraph, or even a sentence. So a quietly cynical account of being a small-time reporter (“I am not one of those hot shot political analysts who ferret out important things about life and corruption. I write about minor cultural happenings and if Patna had a vibrant cocktail circuit I would be what you call a society reporter”) can segue, quite without warning, into the chillingly banal details of a “human interest story” about “a carpenter by caste” being found dead inside Golghar alongside a suicide note saying that his Bhumihar wife of two months had been abducted by her parents. Or a bunch of regulars at the run-down Annapoorna Café can move from sniggering about the death of someone they know as his being “’set’ for life” to being forced to reluctantly register the event as a tragedy (“The laughter slowly left their lips. They lowered their eyes and dragged on a Charminar.”)

The constant movement between cynicism and sentiment seems, in fact, to be a characteristic of Chowdhury’s narratorial voice. In Patna Roughcut, his first novel, published in 2005, this voice was even more unpolished, literally rough-cut. That book opened, for instance, with the following analogy: “Dreams are like cut-glass carafes… [they] only look beautiful on the sideboards of the rich because if a particular dream suddenly shatters, they can always buy another. The poor shouldn’t dream. They can’t afford it.” There is something about this, combining as it does the dramatic tone of 1980s filmi dialogue with the attempted epigraph-like tone of teenage autograph books, that comes off sounding much less cool and much more sentimental than it seems to aim for. At first reading, it appears naïve, cliched and wannabe philosophical, all at once. But then it strikes one that may be precisely the tone that the author intends to create – the voice of a narrator who is much less cynical than he pretends to be, whose self-conscious veneer of bravado is often betrayed by a rather emotional, even romantic core.

This tone is common to both Ritwik Ray of Patna Roughcut and Hriday Thakur of Day Scholar, whose first person narratives make up a great part of those books, respectively (though Patna Roughcut does contain sections narrated by figures who have previously appeared in Ritwik’s narrative as characters). There are several other things that Ritwik and Hriday have in common – their Patna pasts, their Delhi University present and their writerly ambitions. They share these with each other as well as with Siddharth Chowdhury – which might push readers in the direction of reading these novels as autobiographical. Which they may well be. But Chowdhury pre-empts any such boringly linear thoughts with some clever intertextual jugglery, making Ritwik, his girlfriend Mira Verma and the Subaltern historian Samar Sinha from Patna Roughcut make guest appearances in Day Scholar. This constant cross referencing of characters, even minor ones – like Sudama Pathak, who appears in Patna Roughcut as the author of the masterful and deeply unsettling “Patna Good Food Guide” and reappears in Day Scholar when he befriends Hriday, his junior at Commerce College, and then plays a critical role in his arrival at Shokeen Nivas, the faux-hostel full of (largely Bihari) Delhi University students that is the setting for Day Scholar – creates a kind of deliberate jigsaw of characters and events, and goes a long way towards making Chowdhury’s universe come brilliantly and cinematically to life, in the manner of some Robert Altman movie.

The other thing that Chowdhury has, and has in abundance, is a sense of place, which is linked, of course, to a sense of time. If in Patna Roughcut he cuts rapidly between Patnas past and present, deftly splicing his account of the still seersucker-suited ex-zamindar Mrinal Thakur-Chowdhury being escorted home by rickshaw in the 1980s with say, the near-mythical encounter that took place between a Pathan miner and an Ara Rajput on Direct Action Day 1946, in Day Scholar Chowdhury concentrates on recreating an early 1990s world. It is the world of pre-liberalisation India, constituted in no small measure through the invocation of a constellation of (often branded) objects whose names are enough to jolt the Indian reader of a certain age into a shared nostalgia for a middle class material culture that seems historic even if its constituents may in fact survive: Sandow ganjis, Rajdoot 175 motorcycles, Brilliant Tutorials, portable Panasonics, flared black jeans, “the kind one bought cheap from Tank Road in Karol Bagh”, Graviera suit lengths offered as gurudakshina to those who wrote exams on one’s behalf.

In terms of locale, with Day Scholar, Chowdhury’s centre of gravity moves from Patna’s Kadam Kuan: “a place of genteel shabbiness, large colonial houses with peeling paint, peopled with once-aristocratic families come down in life” where “ambition and upward mobility are looked down upon and the trading classes frankly distrusted” to the badlands of North Delhi, encompassing Delhi University, with Shokeen Niwas at its centre. The pride taken in the acquisition of Shokeen Niwas by its half-Jat half-Gujjar owner, the formidable light-eyed political broker and property dealer Zorawar Singh Shokeen, gives Chowdhury a chance to mull lovingly on the spatio-historical landscape of North Campus and its hinterlands:

“From the terrace Zorawar can see… Kirori Mal and Hansraj College at a stone’s throw. Beyond loom the dense kikar-encrusted Delhi Ridge and Bara Hindu Rao, where in 1857 Zorawar’s Gujjar ancestors fought their last stand against the British and their Sikh mercenaries and forever lost the land on which the North Campus would later be built. Hindu College, St. Stephen’s College, and the back gate of Miranda House… If Zorawar turns his head he can see Roop Nagar, Shakti Nagar, Amba Cinema Hall and outside it Darvesh Dhaba which serves wonderful frontier food, and finally Malkaganj where Mrs. Midha, his future paramour, lives with her homeopath husband and fourteen-year-old daughter.”

Later in the book, Chowdhury pithily describes the campus coming alive with the public theatre of male-female interaction: “Like in most small towns of Bihar, when evening descends and people saunter off to the nearby railway station for entertainment, so in Delhi University Biharis… lit out for Chhatra Marg. There they would dawdle for a couple of hours, have tea at Jai Jawan dhaba, meet their girlfriends… and thrash out ‘compromises; without any group coming to real blows. ‘Compromises’ were usually about imagined slights to one’s dignity concerning a girl who was a ‘sister’ even though the girl may not have known the guy but was from the same town.”

As should be apparent from all this, Chowdhury has few equals when it comes to the deftly drawn pen-portrait. His prose may appear littered with names and places and dates and events (mostly remembered ones, though sometimes also, as in the passage above, events still to come), but if you look carefully, this dense accumulation of detail is carried out with the utmost attentiveness. The throwaway ease with which new characters are introduced and side-stories told is a narratorial strategy, deliberately crafted to create the impression of chatty, gossipy storytelling – what in North India might most clearly be described as gup. And one of the most striking things about this gupbaaz tone is its uncensored, unexpurgated quality. Among the things Chowdhury is not coy about is sex: Day Scholar opens with a sex scene that involves not just its mutually consenting participants but also a contingent of Peeping Toms. Later, it introduces the reader to such remarkable psycho-social concepts as the chutpal: “[J]ust like every door has a dwarpal every chut has a chutpal. A chutpal never gets the chut just like the dwarpal rarely gets to sleep in the master bedroom. Every good girl needs at least one chutpal, to run errands for her and listen to her bitch about her mother.”

Even more striking, though are Chowdhury’s (or rather his characters’) unabashed references to caste, around which most Indian writing in English tends to maintain a cordon sanitaire of coyness and/or stifling political correctness even stronger than that which surrounds sex and sexuality. Chowdhury has no such compunctions. From the Bhumihar Jishnu da’s distrust of Bengalis (“They think too much. You cannot trust such people”) to the matter-of-fact reference to the delicacy of “Bania girls before the fat finally catches up with them”, or Mrs. Midha’s comment about liberalization as God’s gift to the upper castes, this is a world in which caste is simply a fact of life – the basis of opinions, alliances and battles, not something swept under the carpet. Like with much else in Day Scholar, it may seem unsavoury, but it seems real.

Published in the March-April 2011 issue of Biblio.