In between spaces: Amit Chaudhuri's Friend of My Youth

Amit Chaudhuri urges readers to revisit their memories, and take pleasure in their own experiences through time
Amit Chaudhuri / Photo by Geoff Pugh
Amit Chaudhuri / Photo by Geoff Pugh

Amit Chaudhuri’s novel, Friend of My Youth, makes for a breezy read and can easily be finished over a work-shy afternoon. But the book has a bit more of an impact, urging readers to revisit and evaluate their own life stories. “This is as much about your memory as it is about mine and others,” offers the writer. “The story is talking about a friend’s life as being a part of my life, your life, and the city’s life too.”

Friend of My Youth goes back to the writer’s childhood in Bombay (Mumbai), and opens with a paragraph from One-Way Street, by Walter Benjamin: “In a night of despair I dreamed I was with my first friend from my school days, whom I had not seen for decades and had scarcely ever remembered in that time, tempestuously renewing our friendship and brotherhood.”

“The book is very personal,” says Chaudhuri. “It’s almost entirely true to me, though, art cannot be only personal. Just as Benjamin’s diary entry is presumably based on a real friend, this too is based on someone real and historical.”

But the factuality of incidents isn’t what this is about. “The question of it being real is not interesting to me, in the conventional sense,” clarifies Chaudhuri. “I’m not writing this to give you tidbits about myself or my friend or about Bombay. I’m writing it to explore something else.”
 

Amit Chaudhuri's <em>Friend of my Youth</em>
Amit Chaudhuri's Friend of my Youth


No friend of mine 
Friend of My Youth untangles a relative point — in relation to one’s past, hometown or city, childhood, parents, and all “those things we take for as givens”. In Chaudhuri’s words, “At a certain juncture, we understand their fictionality — in the sense that they’re not given. They are contingent. This is what I’m looking at — things that seem to be continuous with the past, but are not actually so.”

The book thus explores the commingling of absence, familiarity and estrangement. “It’s a tragic thought,” offers Chaudhuri. “Where you wake up and remember your friend is dead. But in the dream, you are together. And then, you connect this death somehow with a state of emergency that the nation is in.”

Chaudhuri elaborates on a passage about a visit to The Taj Mahal Palace, where the site of the 26/11 terror attack of 2008 looks more or less untouched. “There are no signs of damage, but he knows this is an illusion — that the Taj has been through a complete transformation,” he explains. “The pristine quality is both real and not real.”

A spur for the story was his own visit to Mumbai, as an adult. “I went there and could not find a friend,” says the writer. “That had an unexp-ected impact on me. I didn’t expect that the absence of this friend would affect me in this way, and I remember feeling a degree of lostness, feeling strangely disoriented, as this person was no longer there. That took me by surprise.” 

The notion of belonging struck in hard, he says, “realising you don’t have a home in the city you grew up in.”

The sound of silence 
Chaudhuri’s writing retains a wonderful poetic quality, a compliment that necessarily considers his career as an Indian classical vocalist and musician. “I have not come up with an adequate reply about how one informs the other,” he submits, about the musician and novelist in him playing off each other. “When I sing a khayal, I forget my writer self. And when I’m a writer, I forget about myself as a musician,” he insists.

“But there are connections — one is the sensitivity to sound,” he elaborates. “I have a great interest in the soundscape that constitutes our lives. There are things I hear at every moment which I can’t see; these noises surround us — from the next street or another flat. But I cannot see what the source of these sounds is. That world is invisible, but has an impact on me at every moment, through sound. That to me is very important — as a writer, musician and composer.”

Chaudhuri explains his understanding of music as “a form which doesn’t progress in a normal sense, but works through pauses, and even silences, evolving through the experience of time”. The timing is all-important, he notes. “With a piece of music, you are aware of it only for a certain duration,” he says. “That is why I love the short novel, because you inhabit it only for a while. This idea of a changed space, or a limited period of time, is important to me as a writer and musician.”

Chaudhuri goes on to emphasise an aspect that he mentions in the novel. “I want to blur the distinction between the act of writing and the act of living,” he says. “I’m looking at what makes us think of these things as completely separate. The fact that a writer lives and the fact that the writer writes — how we always compartmentalise this into different parts.”

His writing is thereby circumstantially immersed in “a form of purposelessness”. “I think that especially in India, the emphasis on news means that we don’t open ourselves. We don’t know how to deal with what is not news. That is one thing that writing or art can give us, and challenge us, to deal with. What is that world outside news? These boundaries are, to an extent, artificial and useless.”

A point of no return
The power of suggestion thus gains potency in Chaudhuri’s writing. “The pursuit of success is taken 
to be permanent,” he observes. “We now sub-consciously take these terms of success to be the sole definition,” he explains. “That again closes us from the daily scramble of desultory activities which have their own purpose or pleasure that cannot be defined by notions of success. This is what I’ve always been concerned with, this kind of pointless activity whose main purpose doesn’t seem to be success.” At the heart of it, Chaudhuri insists, “the very act of writing resists such entrenched ways of thought”.

Friend of My Youth, Penguin Random House, `499. 

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