Angst of youth in the City of Joy captured skillfully
Aradhika Sekhon

The Youth
by Sunil Gangopadhyay. Rupa. Pages 212. Rs 195.

ALTHOUGH Youbok Yubotira, of which The Youth is a translation, was originally written in 1967, it is as representative of the Calcutta youth as if it were written much more recently. Written almost four decades ago, the characters are so universal in their appeal that identification with them is possible even to this day. That is the strength of the novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay who remains one of the most popular writers of modern Bengal. Poet, novelist, journalist, and writer, Gangopadhyay topped his career by bagging the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel Sei Samay.

The Youth loses very little in the translation by Sanchayita Chatterjee who has managed to retain the flavour of Calcutta by capturing the essence of the original work. The novel is about several young men and women — the intelligentsia of Bengal. Poets, writers, professors successful and unsuccessful, widely published and struggling-to-be-published, popular and obscure, men of genius and mediocrity, all of them live out their lives against the backdrop of the pulsating city of Calcutta.

In the foreword to the second edition of the book the author wrote that this book was a kind of journal, documenting the lives and times of his friends and by extension, the youth around him. In fact, the novel has an interesting format. It delineates the lives of a group of people who interact with each other at a particular level but have their own concerns and conflicts, confusions and turmoils to deal with. Each chapter deals with a different character who becomes central and the others, peripheral. The reader thus sees all other characters through the eyes of the central character. Thus, the significance of the roles of all the characters keeps changing from being paramount to being negligible.

The novel does not have any formal plot but only small vignettes of the lives and motivations of ‘the youth’ as they are held up to the scrutiny of the novelist one-by-one. So if the reader is looking for a book with a ‘beginning, a middle, an end’, this is not for him. But if he is ready to be slightly disturbed by a group of disparate young men with their own codes of morality and individualistic attitudes towards life, then, surely, this is the book for him.

Avinash, for instance, is haunted by what he did the previous winter although his attitude has always been, "I have never tried to bind passions; to me unfulfilled passion has always been worse than death`85I cannot be friends with any woman. That is why most women in my acquaintance know me as a very shy person or as a rather bold, ungentlemanly one". This leads him to deceive his trusting friend, Animesh, whose hospitality he enjoys and yet, "I had no gain to make from what happened that afternoon. There was actually nothing else involved in it`85this was just an afternoon’s accident. There was nothing to do in the afternoon- still Animesh, I ask for your forgiveness."

Then there is Chaya didi with the white patches on her skin, an ugly cancer eating up her innards while she yearns for tender moments of love. All the young poets and writers love to gather in her house for tea, pakoras and discussions, which she willingly provides, but all of them would rather pay romantic attentions to Maya, her willful younger sister. Chaya is a sad character as she lies dying of the cancer and of unrequited love, all the while churning out reams of bad poetry.

In fact, none of the characters are particularly happy ones. Neither Avinash, nor Bimalendu nor Tanya, Tapas, Hemkanti, Parikshit or Shekhar. They all have their own traumas to face`85. Joblessness, ugliness, genius, guilt, loneliness, loss. They have different motives to write and create — to be successful, to earn money or to find an outlet for their creativity.

The only two people who seem to be in tune with life and at ease with themselves to some extent are Bimalendu, the sympathetic yet pragmatic young poet, fairly successful, who declares to his group of friends, "Do you know what sort of love you people have? Your heart cries out for a dead ant but you are not bothered if your mother at home even gets to eat." The other is Animesh who declares when he learns of his wife’s pregnancy, "I’ve finally become a complete man. I am a family man, I am a working man, I am a father!"

The others are haunted by demons. Tapas, is unemployed and swindles and sponges off his friends and doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from but is a gifted poet. Hemkanti, is in quest of ‘coming alive’ because he once tried to commit suicide and now has to worry about his present ‘second life’ because "man gets one life to spend as he wills it. I had got two, one which I had tried to destroy myself." Parikshit is the most fascinating character. The bohemian, larger than life, gifted genius who doesn’t know if his near death was an accident, a failed suicide or an attempted murder.

Sunil Gangopadhyay has thus captured the true spirit of the youth of Calcutta — a breed apart from the youth of any other metro of the country. Their concerns and ethos are typical of the city — the City of Joy where every young man is a poet or, at the very least, a writer and a thinker.

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