Lost youth
In Amit Chaudhuri’s slippery new novella, the disappearance of a childhood friend reveals voids of all kinds
Over four days in November 2008, 10 men acting on behalf of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group killed 164 people in a series of co-ordinated gun and bomb attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai. One of the targets was the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, in which a novelist called Amit Chaudhuri, who appears in the new book by novelist Amit Chaudhuri, spent time as an adolescent, and to which the in-the-novel Amit Chaudhuri returns some time later when promoting a book, The Immortals, which happens also to be the name of a book by the in-real-life Amit Chaudhuri. All of this takes place in a novel — or a novella perhaps — by in-real-life Amit Chaudhuri called Friend of My Youth. Got it? Kind of? Good.
The friend of the title — itself openly borrowed from the title of a short story by Alice Munro — is Amit’s school friend Ramu, whom he often sees when he returns to Bombay
(Amit spent time in Britain and now lives in Calcutta). Only Ramu, like Bombay/Mumbai, has recently experienced some hardships of his own — his heroin addiction has seen him carted off to a rehab facility
— so on this trip, Ramu isn’t around.
In-the-novel Amit (upon whom, incidentally, in-real-life Amit bestows a tendency towards pontification and pomposity) won’t see him this time, and another of his metaphysical ties to the city is loosened.
Does in-real-life Amit actually have a friend called Ramu? Maybe. Or is he a fictional figure, conjured up to discuss the subtle mutability of male friendship, or the connection of memory to place? Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. Chaudhuri, an esteemed writer of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and criticism, has been described as the “Indian Proust”, but what he does in this short novel, with exquisite delicacy, is show disconnection, vacancy, and the physical world’s imperviousness to human action, even of the most violent kind. In going back to Bombay, in-the-novel Amit returns to his youth quite literally, only to find that, aside from some shreds of memories that flutter precariously in his own mind and those of a few others, he himself is startlingly absent.
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Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri (Faber) is out on 24 August