Book Review: Friend Of My Youth

Book: Friend Of My Youth
Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 135

Not much actually happens in this book, which, those familiar with Amit Chaudhuri's writings, will not find surprising.

Pared to the essentials, the sequence of events, rather non-events, that make up the narrative would sound almost too banal to fill the pages of a book, even a slim one such as this — the author flies to Bombay for a book reading; calls a friend; takes a taxi to the club where he is to stay, ruminating on the city outside; walks to a nearby store to buy toothpaste; walks some more; enters the Kamala Nehru Park; takes another taxi to the Taj Mahal hotel in order to exchange the shoes of his mother and wife at Joy Shoes; explores the hotel, has a cup of tea at the Sea Lounge.... and so on. There's no plot, and no epiphany at the end.

The drama lies in the interstices of these unremarkable occurrences. It lies in the writer's singular consciousness — self-conscious, erudite, serious and fastidious — that lights upon them; it lies in the memories and ruminations that the sights and sounds around him give rise to, and in his dry sense of humour that invites you to laugh with, and sometimes at, himself.

The thing about such a stream of consciousness in the narrative is that it allows the author to bring in this, that and everything — the ebb and flow of life itself. And Chaudhuri casts his net wide, bringing in bits of literary criticism, family history, views on life, relationships, the publishing industry in India, the city of Bombay, Parsi food and restaurants, including how much he likes bombil, etc. If there's something holding the narrative together, popping up like a refrain every few pages, it is 'Ramu', introduced on the first page as "my first friend from my schooldays". Ramu is a drug addict who buys his stuff from the shady peddlers in the narrow lanes in Colaba, almost died from an overdose, and has spent most of his adult life in and out of rehab. Ramu, as the name itself suggests, is strikingly plebian, quite out of place with the refined upper middle class life that the author describes — a successful novelist written about in newspapers and invited to literature festivals, the son of a high-ranking executive who would be chauffeur driven to school in a Mercedes, and whose mother and wife, despite a decline in fortunes, still buy shoes only at Joy Shoes. He is plebian in appearance, too, as the author takes care to emphasise — dressed in tere-cotton pants, with thinning hair, and driving a scooter, whose pedal needs to be prodded repeatedly before it makes "the familiar racket". And yet, there's an odd camaraderie between the two, a bond created by shared experience, including that of having watched porn videos together as boys. Ramu is the one the author would hang out with every time he came to Bombay, the one who tagged along on his meetings and lunches, and attended his readings. Ramu seems to become, in the author's mind, to be inextricably linked to Bombay, and an embodiment of his own love-hate relationship with the city.

In the end, this is a book about Bombay — yes, it's always the old, British-given name Chaudhuri uses — and the conflicted relationship we all have with places we grow up in. You could call it an exercise in nostalgia, both for the way the city used to be and for his lost boyhood. Such as when he'd pray fervently to the "various Catholic figurines" that lined his way to school, among them "a kindly shape that said 'Our Lady of Dolours' beneath it" at the traffic jam in Marine Lines, asking them to marshal their divine powers to "Please let Mr Mazumdar not tell me to run today"! It's not a happy memory, and yet there's affection and a sense of fun in the act of looking back. Quite like Bombay itself.