‘The Hush of the Uncaring Sea’: The lyrical and unapologetic world of Upamanyu Chatterjee
This book is a collection of four novellas, each offering a distinctive flavour in terms of its tone, tenor and texture
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Book Title: The Hush of the Uncaring Sea
Author: Upamanyu Chatterjee
For nearly four decades now, Upamanyu Chatterjee has donned these two very different hats, of a bureaucrat and a novelist, with equal panache and felicity. With as many as nine novels to his credit, he has earned for himself a respectable place among the practitioners of contemporary Indian English fiction.
‘English, August’ (1988), ‘The Last Burden’ (1993), ‘The Way to Go’ (2011) and ‘Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life’ (2024) are some of his more talked about novels. It was his burlesque fantasy, ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’ (2000), that prompted the Sahitya Akademi to confer on him its prestigious award in 2004.
Often drawing upon the rich repertoire of his experience as a bureaucrat, Upamanyu offers no apologies while presenting his half-comical, half-satirical vision of the Kafkaesque world. Looking far beyond the seductive trappings of bureaucracy, in novel after novel, Upamanyu reasserts his commitment to ‘the last man standing’ and also reaffirms our faith in the common man’s resilience and essential humanity.
‘The Hush of the Uncaring Sea’ is a collection of four novellas, written over seven years, only one of which, ‘The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian’, is already published; the other three are being published here for the first time. Though bound by a common vision, each offers a distinctive flavour in terms of its tone, tenor and texture.
Upamanyu is a master of the bizarre and the quixotic. One may have heard of any number of stories where a loyal retainer bludgeons all the family members to death and disappears. Often the motive is either robbery or revenge. But who could have imagined that a servant would take revenge for being denied non-vegetarian delicacies cooked in the house ever so often. Upamanyu’s dexterity as a storyteller is revealed when, until the very end, he keeps us guessing as to whose ‘revenge’ it actually is and who is the real ‘non-vegetarian’. It’s the exploration of these enigmatic questions that imparts to the narrative its depth and richness, and also its multi-layered intensity.
‘The Hush of the Uncaring Sea’ is about a fatherless young boy of 18, Abani, who, on the orders of his master, a petty shopkeeper, accompanies Bishnu (his master’s son-in-law), a ship steward, to bring back some gifts the latter had got for his wife but left behind in his cabin. Unable to find his way out, Abani accidentally gets trapped inside a linen room, only to be discovered much later once the ship has already set sail. When the Captain gets to know that they have an ‘unwanted passenger’ on board, with no passport, he orders that Abani be lowered into a raft with a few bottles of water and fewer packets of biscuits, strapped onto him.
If Abani manages to survive after 20 days, it’s thanks to the generosity of another Captain, who spots the raft as he stands on the deck watching birds through his binoculars.
It’s an amazing story of exceptional human suffering and ultimate survival, unfolding between the two extremities of appalling human brutality and equally intriguing generosity. Caught between the two, Abani goes through unimaginable suffering and exemplifies almost heroic fortitude. It’s through his poetic, almost lyrical, language that Upamanyu not only softens the blow of Abani’s storm-tossed life as a castaway, but also lends to his suffering a rare universal dimension.
‘The Hapless Prince’, set in the latter half of the 19th century, captures the extreme helplessness of Indian kings and princes, especially in the aftermath of the ‘First War of Independence’. Cast in the magic realist mode, the story turns into a bizarre allegory about the ever-fattening, over-exploitative mechanisms of the Raj, and the ever-growing haplessness of the royalty and the common people alike.
The only weak link in this otherwise fascinating collection is ‘The Stink of Red-Herring’. It’s inspired by the real-life story of a pioneer who set up the first detective agency in India way back in 1960s. Conceived as a slice of detective fiction, the story lacks the pace necessary for it, and also fails on count of the razor-sharp ‘whodunit’ kind of twists and turns detective fiction often thrives on.
In what is otherwise an elegantly produced book, the pagination has been messed up, that too twice over. This aside, the collection does engage us deeply, despite Upamanyu’s somewhat long-winded and circuitous style of storytelling. It’s another matter that he more than makes up for it with a fair sprinkling of wry humour that almost borders on the bizarre, and an imaginative use of elegant, often poetically charged, language.
— The reviewer is a former professor of English at PU
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