Struggling to find meaning in a home away from home
Charming satire follows two Bengali immigrants living opposite lives in Margaret Thatcher’s London
Odysseus Abroad, musician and writer Amit Chaudhuri’s latest work, details a charming wander around the streets of Thatcherite London, sprinkled with references to ancient and modern poetry, Hindu and Greek gods and the journeys of homeward-bound Greeks and Dubliners alike. This gentle satire highlights a day in the life of two immigrant Bengalis; nephew and uncle.
Layers of family rivalries, political, poetical and cultural opinions, emerge against the backdrop of a summer’s day. At nine, late July 1985, Ananda Sen, university student from Bombay, awakens “with the usual feeling of dread.” Straightening his sheets with obsessivecompulsive zeal, he notes a “shiny patch of dried semen, already quite old.”
His pornography-dependent sex life stands in vivid contrast to his Uncle Radhesh’s lifelong celibacy. He’s afraid of women, Ananda thinks about his uncle, but then who isn’t?
Young, self-righteous Ananda then considers the recent Live Aid Concert; the images of starving African children juxtaposed with Londoners joyfully dancing to the Boomtown Rats was a “Dance of Death.” Little wonder he’s isolated.
Although his father supports him, rents are high, budgets tight. Scrimping on meals gives him heartburn. Rap music (more baffling even than disco) from the upstairs flat drives him mad. His uncle also drives him mad, but in an affectionate, familial way. They are, touchingly, each other’s only friend.
Where does he belong? What, for example, is an “Asian?” The old word, “black,” the “catch-all en masse term for those not from Europe” dates from his uncle’s era. “I’m a black Englishman!” proclaims the elegantly tailored Radhesh at unpredictable moments — meaning not “Bengali bhadralok” (middle class).
His uncle’s pension is generous, the rent of his bedsit minuscule. Confident, superior — a recent charge at some late-period skinheads cost him a tooth — he worships Bengali poet Tagore.
Yet the man never visits India. Content to be known as the family’s flaky genius, its “world conqueror,” he sends money to impecunious relations, as befits his nature.
Ananda is not nearly as sure of himself. He is Indian, yes. Yet when waiters welcome him in the Sylheti dialect (spoken in Bangladesh), he strains to understand a language he rarely heard at home.
His father and his take-charge mother, like him, worked and studied in London, remembering “their bleak years in this crushing city with a kind of love.”
Apart from adoring English modernists such as poet Philip Larkin (“One envied Larkin his failure to be prolific”), Ananda is enchanted by BBC children’s programming ( Postman Pat) and Westminster politics, “a great spectacle.” He skips class a lot.
At noon, he meets with his tutor, “Nestor” Davidson (the name is a playful nod, one among many, to the Greek poet Homer).
Bristling at the man’s kindly meant criticism of his “bloodthirsty” poems, Ananda scorns (silently) the list of novels his professor recommends — except for Sons and Lovers (“bursting with sex”).
By now, we realize how intelligent, naive and, well, young, this lonely boy really is.
What, then, does London have to offer? Quite a lot, as it happens.
“He loved light. London had taught him this fact. University had taught him little in comparison; his main education in England was imparted by the day itself, his phases of awkwardness and happiness in its 14 or 15 hours and as a result, the realization that he adored light and sound . . . the street . . . flowing inside through in a shallow current through the crack beneath the raised windowpane.”
After meeting his uncle in Belsize Park (and hearing again about the proper management of one’s bowels), the journey that began in Warren St. and Bloomsbury continues to Hampstead Heath, stopping for snacks and tea, before ultimately coming “full circle” — home. “The moon was up, but a deeper layer of the sky — under its skin — glowed with the remnants of sunshine.”
Chaudhuri’s feast, a luminous and witty celebration of immigrant life, speaks to anyone who has searched for a place to call home. Nancy Wigston is a freelance writer in Toronto.