Tripping on nostalgia

Amit Chaudhuri's descriptions reveal a city that remains largely unseen to its residents

Friend of My Youth

Author: Amit Chaudhuri 

Publisher: Penguin 

Pages: 137 

Price: Rs 499

Nostalgia is a powerful drug; it can lift the most ordinary experiences into the realm of the extraordinary. A useful muse for many writers, the great yearning for times past has given wings to many a plot that may otherwise have crumbled well before the last page was written. To be clear, this is not the kind of nostalgia that leeches through outpourings on social media, rosy-eyed reminiscing about a golden age in an indeterminate past. 

The nostalgia that powers great books is about the heart’s insatiable desire for a life that has long gone by. Friend of My Youth is soaked in such yearning. It is about an author’s return to the city in which he lived and to the relationships that defined his adolescence. It is a narrow slice of his life and a rather limited view of Bombay before it became Mumbai but Amit Chaudhuri’s prose is evocative and his ability to adopt an unhurried tone for a book about city that moves at a ridiculously unrelenting frenetic pace, remarkable. 

Photo: iStock

Chaudhuri’s descriptions reveal a city that remains largely unseen to its residents. He says, of the city’s Bandra-Worli sea link: “It is still. In the monsoon its cables look immovable against the sheets of rain. Suddenly there is an island, low and humped, with irregular houses and a temple…” This casts a rather romantic light on what is an otherwise unremarkable part of the daily commute for most travellers in the city. In another passage, the description of a shoe store (Joy Shoes in the Taj Hotel) goes thus: “We glance at the room, small as a monk’s cell, in which shoes are secreted.” In an instant the ordinary business of shovelling shoes out of cubby holes that all shoe shops in the city possess is magically imbued with a sense of mystery. 

However, a few descriptive portions about South Bombay and the Taj Mahal Hotel apart, the book is more of a personal treasure hunt and less about the places, sights and sounds of the city. The book is not about Bombay, but a life that Chaudhuri once led in the city when it was so called. It does not capture its spirit or the chaos of its streets or anything that is beyond the small and privileged circle of the author/protagonist’s childhood. 

In fact, Bombay begins at Malabar Hill and ends at the Gateway for him. Bandra is the farthest he travels to and that too because the family’s savings have begun to run out after retirement and they have to move into more affordable accommodation. Such indulgence could set a few teeth on edge, but the book does not pretend to be anything else and in that it is honest. It is preoccupied with the elite whose landmarks were the Taj Hotel, Radio Club and Hanging Gardens and for whom the rest of the city was just a blur.

 

The author is searching for a time in his life through the people and places he knew. Be it his addict-friend Ramu, or Little Gibbs Road on Malabar Hill or the attendants at a plush hotel that remember his father; his hunt is illusive and aimless. And this could be trying for a reader looking for a plot, a dramatic turn of events and even resolution in terms of a grand revelation. None of that happens.

Despite the honesty, the power of his prose and the unique point of view, Chaudhuri’s nostalgia trip does not always work. Even though it is a thin book (137 pages) it seems several pages too long because of the sheer banality of the life it describes. The problem is not that the author does not step beyond his privileged circle, but that even when he writes about the people in his universe, he sticks to the superficial. 

His inexplicable affection for a friend whose life seems far more interesting than all the rest of the characters put together is never explored further. We never really understand why his friend Ramu hooked himself up to a life of addiction or why Ramu’s family that seemed to have the same privileges as that of Chaudhuri, never managed to help him out. 

It is clear that Ramu’s character exists to give meaning to the author’s life but it could have been interesting if the choices that led to their contrasting fortunes had been dealt with in full. Instead, the book merely throws up an account of meetings, shared acquaintances and remembered togetherness, sweet and charming though that may be, it does not do justice to a friendship or a novel.