Books: Upamanyu Chatterjee is master of the absurd in his new collection

In the titular novella from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s The Hush of the Uncaring Sea: Novellas 2018-2025, a racist sea captain from Apartheid-era South Africa is talking himself into abandoning an accidental stowaway aboard his ship—a naïve Bengali young man named Abani who boarded in Calcutta (now Kolkata) to see a relative off and took a nap at the wrong time. The passage is vintage Chatterjee, not just because of the black humour but also because of the way he presents evil as a tragically banal phenomenon; the idea that given the right circumstances, any of us could nonchalantly carry out the worst atrocities. Like leaving a helpless young man in the middle of the ocean on a threadbare raft with meagre supplies.

“Kon-Tiki covered seven thousand kilometres of the Pacific in three months on just some logs of balsa. In contrast, our guest would only have to commune with the dolphins for an hour or two before someone picks him up. The Indian Navy, a sister merchant vessel, a deep-sea fishing trawler, a smuggler’s ferry being chased by some coastal patrol—somebody is sure to notice our lad on the raft, swoop down on him and take him in.”

Among the four novellas collected here, The Hush of the Uncaring Sea is the one that represents a departure in style for Chatterjee, and it is unyieldingly strange in the best of ways. After all, being at sea for extended stretches of time exposes the body and the soul to scenarios and challenges that end up reshaping them forever.

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At once a comedy-of-errors, a survival story and a twisted parable, Abani’s journey is presented as neither wholly spiritual nor entirely secular but as the saying goes on X (formerly Twitter), “a secret third thing”. On more than one occasion I was reminded of the works of William Golding, especially his novel Rites of Passage (1980), where a line hits upon this same dialectic tension between religion/philosophy and maritime survivalism: “Philosophy and religion—what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?”

FUNNY YET DARK

The Stink of the Red Herring is perhaps the most genteel of the four novellas, despite it involving a murder mystery—and the founding of India’s first detective agency circa 1961. Prem, the protagonist, leaves what could have been a promising engineering career in the US, to pursue his ambitions as a private investigator. Once again, Chatterjee leaves no stone unturned to highlight the many absurdities a man in Prem’s position might encounter. Like many procedurals, this is a dialogue-heavy story and you can tell Chatterjee is having a lot of fun here, like when we’re in the middle of a story about a gardener who loses his sense of smell in an accident.

“‘Poor fellow. To be a gardener when you can’t smell the roses.’

‘Or the stench of dung for that matter, in the manure.’”

Of course, humour, especially in Chatterjee’s fictional universes, often hides something darker and more ominous underneath. In The Hapless Prince, the longest of these novellas at just over a hundred pages, we meet an Indian prince named Hariram who has been nursing resentments against the British in general—and his bullying British schoolmates in particular—for a while. But when he sets up a plot to assassinate the British Resident and take out his old nemeses, a series of farcical events conspire to derail his plans.

The Hapless Prince sees Chatterjee in peak “dramedy” mode and contains some unforgettable passages, like the one below where Hariram is ranting about the British withholding permission to build a school.

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“And yet when we want to set up, not a mammoth white-marble Temple Trust, not a religious camp for astrologers and soothsayers, but a school, our first school, not for the scions of the polo players of the nobility, but for the poor, you put a spanner in the works because you feel that when ready, it just might make you take a five-minute detour every morning when you want to canter off to Dumraon Hill for your horse-riding. You forget, you know, that we refer matters to you merely out of deference to your paramountcy. You are paramount, of course, but so is that new motion picture company in Hollywood.”

THE SPRAWLING SENTENCE

I had read The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian in 2018, when it had been published as a standalone book. Seven years later, it has lost none of its urgency and in fact reads like it might have been written yesterday.

In 1949, a Muslim family of six (and their dog) is burnt to death inside their own home by a Hindu man driven homicidal by hunger and jealousy. Madhusudan Sen (incidentally, the father of Chatterjee’s famous IAS character Agastya Sen from the novel English, August), the town’s magistrate who cannot complete breakfast without sausage, eggs and liver, vows to turn vegetarian until justice is done.

Of course, with the legal and bureaucratic bottlenecks characteristic of the nascent Indian state, the process ends up dragging its feet until 1973.

This kind of plot is perfect for Chatterjee to tap into his vast reserves of gallows humour—in this case rather literally when the convicted murderer finds himself locked up with two rapists and one child-killer. But because his three cellmates are vegetarian, they are quite comfortable making fun of this man’s meat-eating, calling him “Gomaas Kumar” (gomaas is the Hindi word for beef).

This novella also reminds us that over and above his full comedic bag of tricks (satire, farce, parody), Chatterjee is also one of our finest exponents of the sprawling multi-clause sentence. Notice how he effortlessly conjures a vital, throbbing-with-humanity mis-en-scene of the murdered family’s domestic life here. Everything the flames lick adds something new to our mental picture, and what a poignant picture it is, too.

“It had consumed everything, the dragon’s breath, and found fodder in every nook—the curtains that partitioned off one half of a bedroom, the boy’s schoolbooks, the mother’s saris, the vats of mustard oil and ghee in the kitchen, the rice in the storeroom, the straw cushion that had been the dog’s bed and most of all, the wood and coal kept at hand to stoke the kitchen fire.”

The Hush of the Uncaring Sea sees one of our finest writers in crackling form. Like a true master of the absurd, he’s at his funniest when he’s being deadly serious. In their convictions as well as their fragilities, Chatterjee’s characters are painfully, undeniably Indian.

Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.

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