The delights of litti, whiskey & circular time

SChowdhury’s The Patna Manual of Style is a breath of fresh air after a procession of ordinary fiction published so far in 2015. Common to the nine stories in the book is Patna-born Delhiite Hriday Thakur, who featured in Chowdhury’s previous work, the slim novel Day Scholar. No longer one of Delhi University’s Bihari students, Hriday is part of a minor publishing- academia- advertising social circle and each story glimpses a different character in this circle. The prose is poetically rich and flowing, but as in Anton Chekhov’s short stories the real meaning is in the halts and pauses of utterances, sentences and paragraphs. The stories are interlinked not only by characters and events, but also by mood and time. And though each story is eventful, each denouement is usually a personal epiphany. It isn’t a perfect collection: for instance, one story that presumably tries to mock macho writing only ends up becoming the very thing it mocks. Aside from that false note, much of the rest of Patna Manual quietly dazzles.

The first story, The Importer of Blondes, is the collection’s longest and most action-packed. Hriday has just lost his job at a soft-porn magazine that he had got thanks to Patna poet Ritwik Ray (the star of Chowdhury’s 2005 collection, Patna Roughcut). Serendipitously, Hriday meets Jishnu Da, his college housemate from Day Scholar, while getting a shave: “Of all the saloons in the world, he of course had to walk into mine”, he muses. Jishnu has become an event manager and explains: “We are that very extinct commodity now, that never-do-well younger chacha or cousin who was earlier found in all middle-class homes and was indispensable to all social occasions and oddball jobs. Nowadays everybody works. Nobody is unemployed. And that is where we come in, the Bihar friend who will manage everything for you.” In this case, Jishnu manages dancers from the former Soviet republics.

Importer is the only story in Patna Manual that has menace, suspense and a quirky ending. It is a story with movement. It is also a story that packs much into its sentences and still manages to be breezily paced. Characters who will appear in other stories are casually mentioned — as if introducing the cast of a Chekhov play. The sentences manage to be elliptical without seeming to be at a loss for words (unlike the novel I reviewed last time in these columns. Delhi will lose the literary war, February 22).

The title of the last and secondlongest story, Death of a Proofreader, evokes Arthur Miller’s famous play on a man’s memories and his illusions. It originates on Christmas Eve 1998, the day that Importer took place, wherein Hriday had planned to have litti, a Bihari specialty. In Death… it is later that night that he finally sits down to have litti and meets Samuel Aldington Macauley Crown, lover of books and Peter Scot whiskey, who claims to have a bit of Scottish ancestry and whose name evokes a multiplicity of ironies. The story takes place five months later, at Crown’s funeral, with Hriday hoping for closure in Crown’s relationships, all failures because though he was only a proofreader — and an exemplary one at that, in the classical tradition — he is the one character in this book who immersed himself in the world of the written word, a world that the other characters spend their lives aspiring to. It gives Hriday his final if grim epiphany: “Hriday would realise that family and friends were more important than the artistic life he was striving for.”

Indeed, Crown’s publishing house that Hriday joins is called Proscenium, underlining not just the stage-like nature of each story but also how the characters act out their lives. (Hriday is a dropout from his M.Phil in Shakespeare Studies: as the Bard said, “all the world’s a stage” and “the play’s the thing”.) One thing that gets constant and noticeably heavy in detail is each character’s clothing — everyone is apparently in costume for the play in progress. The fact that what is foretold at the end of the first story is the same event as what happens to introduce the last story — Hriday eating litti — not only gives a three-dimensional space around which the stories of Patna Manual are woven, a space in which the rest of the characters are located, but this three-dimensionality also underlines the plays-within-aplay nature of the collection — as opposed to the flat of the cinematic canvas.

I liked Patna Manual as I have liked Chowdhury’s earlier works and while reading it I was reminded — for no logical reason, I admit — of another Aleph publication, Amitava Kumar’s Matter of Rats (2013). Both Chowdhury and Kumar are nonresident Biharis and both have written about what Patna means to them. Kumar’s is a compact and lucid piece of excellent reportage whereas Chowdhury’s title tells you what his idea is: the internal Patna as opposed to Kumar’s external Patna. When I reviewed Rats I had expressed a wish that it were longer, which in hindsight might have been unfair (not least because the book stuck to the parameters of Aleph’s cities project). However, it is not unreasonable to expect that after three slim volumes, a writer like Chowdhury, who has mastered his craft and knows his craft’s masters, ought to create something epic. Maybe I am being unfair, but isn’t it always the case that when you taste something delicious, you want more?

AAditya Sinha is a journalist

based in New Delhi

Ian Fleming went to Eton in the autumn of 1921 and left, aged 17, in 1926 for a crammer in Newport Pagnell to be prepared for Sandhurst and a career in the Army. At Eton he was in the same house, the Timbralls, as his older brother, Peter. There was a new house master, E.V. “Sam” Slater, described by one old boy as an “abrupt, redfaced bachelor with a loud voice and a liking for port”. Sam Slater had no liking for Ian Fleming, and Fleming’s few years at Eton under Slater’s tutelage did not bring out the best in him.

This unsatisfactory situation was no doubt complicated by the fact that Peter Fleming (just a year older) was turning out to be a storybook Etonian hero. A serious boy, an outstanding scholar, liked by everyone, Peter Fleming’s refulgence was bound to obscure the complex, moody character that his younger brother was already becoming. You either liked or you didn’t like Fleming minor, it seemed, and he didn’t encourage popularity, pointedly choosing to spend time each day alone, enjoying his own company.

Fleming did excel at one thing, however: athletics. He became the outstanding athlete — victor ludorum — of the school two years running, in 1925 and 1926.

Because of Peter Fleming’s acclaim and influence Ian was put up for “Pop”, Eton’s elite boys’ society with its own arcane privileges. Even with the demigod Peter as his sponsor it took five goes to get Ian elected — he was black-balled on the first four proposals.

But it was Ian’s widowed mother, Eve, who really influenced the course of his education. Ian was the second of her four sons. Ian, she decided, would become a soldier so she had Ian enrolled in the Army Class at Eton, where boys were prepared for the military colleges at Sandhurst or Woolwich. This was a real fall in the Eton caste system — Army Class boys were dullards and simpletons. Ian joined their number, but not for long. His mother removed him from the school at the age of 17 and sent him to a special crammer for boys applying to Sandhurst. Newport Pagnell became his home for the remaining months of his secondary education.

So what did Fleming make of Eton? It wasn’t a happy time, one feels, but he did make some lasting friends. In any event, one’s life at a single-sex public school achieves its mythic personal significance in hindsight, most often.

Paul Gallico, the American novelist, who was a friend of Ian Fleming, wrote in an introduction to a James Bond omnibus that Fleming had an “implacable distaste for Eton which has lasted to this day”. Fleming corrected the manuscript, deleting “implacable distaste” and substituting “mysterious affection”. I suspect that is close to the truth but there is some other evidence to suggest that the memories were more tarnished when one considers what Fleming provided for James Bond by way of education.

Like Fleming, Bond was sent to Eton, but only managed two terms, “a brief and undistinguished” career, before being expelled, according to Bond’s obituary in You Only Live Twice, because of a dalliance with one of the school’s maids. A precocious 13-year-old, indeed. Bond then went on to Fettes College in Edinburgh, his father’s old school, where he spent the next four years or so before lying about his age and joining the Special Branch of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1941.

It’s an intriguing choice. Why Fettes? Why Scotland? Fettes is one of Scotland’s grander public schools (alumni include Michael Tippett, Tilda Swinton, Tony Blair and a lot of Scottish rugby players). The consensus is that this late delineation of Bond’s life in You Only Live Twice — published in 1964 and the last completed Bond novel that Fleming wrote before he died — was influenced by the casting of Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr No (1962). Fleming’s Bond was now flesh and blood and indisputably Scottish. The triumphant success of Connery as Bond, it can plausibly be argued, must have begun to shape the backstory that Fleming now envisaged for his world-famous protagonist.

My feeling was that the Connery influence was more profound and was the catalyst for a new emphasis on Scotland and the Scots in Fleming’s final novels that is hard to ignore. The Flemings were, of course, of Scottish descent but had been thoroughly anglicised. I detect in the choice of Fettes over Eton, in the nationality of Bond himself (half Scottish, half Swiss) a growing and distinct distancing from England and the values of English high society in Fleming.

This was his world but you can see in the timeline and biography he was constructing for Bond in the late novels a return to his Scottish Fleming roots. It’s particularly obvious in The Man with the Golden Gun — Fleming’s final, uncompleted Bond novel. In the novel Bond says he regards himself as “a Scottish peasant and will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant”. On one page alone Bond refers to himself three times as a Scot. I think it was the Connery effect that brought this about but it may also be an oblique comment on Fleming’s time at school. Deep down he really didn’t want James Bond to be an Old Etonian.

William Boyd is the author of the James Bond novel Solo. His new novel, Sweet Caress, will be published in September

By arrangement with the Spectator