An Empty Laughter

The novel’s protagonist is Bhola, a young middle-class man consumed by a riot of desire. He desires men and women, young and old; but most of all he desires what he calls "the lower orders", for whom he feels such disgust that his unacceptable impulses can flourish there, unashamed. Early on, equally full of lust and disgust, he meets a voluptuous working-class woman and her svelte husband: The patches of perspiration at her armpits extended to her breasts. With the edge of her sari, she scrubbed away at the exudation and heat on her upper lip, cheeks, neck and throat. He wanted to lick the sweat out of her cleavage, wondered how many dozens were fucking her and then felt dizzy when he thought of the moist heat in her loins.... To restrain himself from loutish contact Bhola briefly surveyed the diseases that he could catch from intimate contact with the couple—syphilis, hepatitis B, tuberculosis, leprosy, herpes...

Bhola’s dogged sexual pursuit of these two people takes over the rest of his life and leads him deeper into middle-class failure: education, career, family relationships, marriage and fatherhood are all compromised. As he progressively degrades himself, podgy Bhola becomes increasingly obsessed by "weight loss", a dream of becoming slim, but also of shedding all excess in his life, and becoming pure. But it is clear that the fantasy of purity will always remain otherworldly, because in truth it is a fantasy of death: He would sink into the scalding morass and then burn, burn; he would at last emerge in another life, pale, whittled down to the bone, thin and light, bleached of all desire.

And indeed he can find no other way of resolving the contradictions of his life. Bhola slits his wrists, age 37.

This tale is stamped with Chatterjee’s brand of absurd humour, but nowhere in his tenebrous oeuvre has laughter rung so hollow. No authorial sunlight glints around the edges of Bhola’s disgust; in fact the voice of the narrator, with its prudish asides about bad driving and bad hygiene, seems even more horrified by society than Bhola himself. It is the narrator, not Bhola, who likens the vendors who sell their wares in his middle-class colony to "the lepers harassing the King of the Jews outside the temple in Jesus Christ Superstar"; and, accordingly, the novel’s working-class characters fail to demonstrate any sign of human decency, fulfilling instead every cliche of middle-class suspicion: stealing, money-grasping, deception, violence, and disease. Chatterjee’s ruthlessness, however, is not class-specific: all the characters in this novel are hunted down by their maker until nothing is left at its end but an abject human wreckage, dead and dying. It is a world so sclerotic and poisoned that Bhola’s disgust seems like a reasonable response, and it is difficult to draw any pleasure or insight from the tale of his demise.

Readers of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s earlier novels will spy in this one a number of familiar themes: the claustrophobia of middle-class life, the violence of school and family, the non-viability of sexual desire. But one wonders whether these themes have become too familiar. In The Last Burden (1993) we encountered school teacher Miss Jeremiah, and "the spectacle of her hunk armpit...a meaty spread of talcum and sable stubble"; in Weight Loss, whose prose has little of the flair of the earlier books, we learn that a teacher of the same name has her arms "linked overhead to display armpits that were vast and grey wastelands of talcum and stubble". Perhaps it is this inability to leave behind old material that explains the sense of spiritual depletion this new novel has.

Bhola is a character confronted with a problem of the imagination: how can he conceive of a life in which his desire for middle-class success can find a stable compromise with the anarchy of his sexual impulses? His imagination fails to rise to this challenge, and he treads a single-track road to destruction. But we end this novel with the heavy feeling that it carries no excess of authorial wisdom—that the moral creativity of its author is equally defeated by the world he describes. Upamanyu Chatterjee is currently working on his fifth novel: one hopes that he will find new terrains, where his imagination can once again take flight.

(Rana Dasgupta is the author of Tokyo Cancelled.)