Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel languorously moves through the ragas of the Eighties Bombay.
In an essay from his recent collection, Clearing a Space, Amit Chaudhuri has written of the importance of exploring “the elisions that direct the binaries (East, West; high, low; native, foreign; fantasy, reality; elite, democratic)”. In his new novel, The Immortals, he continues to uncover such elisions by delving deep into the lives of disparate individuals living in the Bombay of the Seventies and Eighties.

The focus is primarily on Mallika, incipient professional singer, married to Apurva Sengupta, chief executive of a large corporation, and their sensitive son Nirmalya. The other pole of the narrative concerns Shyamji, musician and tutor, who instructs Mallika and then Nirmalya in the intricacies of Indian classical music. Others who wing their way in and out of the novel include the Neogis, old friends of the Senguptas, a domestic retinue of cooks and cleaners, and others from Shyamji’s extended family, who also dabble in music.

Chaudhuri’s fiction has always had more to do with delicacy, nuance and the minutiae of the everyday, than grand national narratives, character development or plotted arcs. It’s no surprise then that he follows the same template here, as he traces Nirmalya’s coming of age, Mallika’s blanched dreams and Shyamji’s disillusionment over the years. 

There’s an elegiac, long-summer-afternoon tone to much of the book, with Chaudhuri taking his time to explore moods, their gradations and his characters’ self-questioning ways. Of a character’s using the word “beautiful” to describe a Cuffe Parade flat, for example, he writes, “By ‘beautiful’ she didn’t mean what she meant when wandering about an art gallery, or assessing one of her husband’s graphic designs; as an adult sometimes pretends to use a word in a simple, clear, limited way for the benefit of a child, she used the word as the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie thoughtlessly used it, as an uncomplicated acknowledgement of well-being.”

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