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A middle-aged Bengali man spending more than three hundred pages of a fairly large book talking about his past love failures may seem like a typically indulgent male idea and not very enlightening. It’s not the kind of book you presume would offer anything more than surface-level summaries of the relationships. It’s definitely not the kind of book you presume would make you start thinking about your own relationships and the balance of power, love, lust, emotions, anxieties, and fear in them. Yet, much like Bagchi’s previous work, Above Average, which Unknown City is a successor to, lulls you into a false sense of flatness before it suddenly hits you with something you weren’t quite ready for.
Inhabiting a story
Unknown City unfolds like a conversation between Arindam Chatterjee, whom we first meet in Above Average, and the reader. It’s not simply a story told in the first person – it feels like it’s being narrated to you by the lead player during a late-night post-beer conversation in your drawing room. You can almost hear the voice quiver, the change of pitch, the crying and the sobbing, and the self-deprecatory heaviness of the voice. Before describing particularly rough periods of his personal life, which may or may not involve another person, Arindam has built up the momentum to such a degree that this crash feels as intense to you as it was to him. Chatterjee uses the book not only to tell the story, but also to invite us to inhabit it with the narrator.
The said narrator is acutely self-aware of his own masculinity and insecurities, but he’s also looking for a place for himself on the landscape of feminism. He believes himself to be “better” than his peers, men who are crass, degrading, misogynistic – and engineering colleges have no dearth of them – but he admits he is more concerned about this positioning, of being on the right side of history, than trying to understand the woman he loves and what she feels about his viewpoint. Bagchi’s Chatterjee bares himself enough to be laid open for judgment and questioning, but this also leads us to withdraw rather than confront him. His admission of his behaviour is a judgment he passes on himself.
Inhabiting places
Apart from women, and some men, another overarching character of the book is a place. Any place. Bagchi uses geography to develop, frame, and end entire plot arcs. There is a constant tug-of-war happening between his love for his hometown – Delhi – and his adopted home in Baltimore, US. The very first relationship of the book opens with (the one with which Above Average ended) on somewhat similar lines – Delhi is a constant third wheel.
Arindam and Supriya know each other from their younger days, meet again, and fall in love in Delhi. There is a brief period of consideration for the UK to come into the picture, but that doesn’t materialise and, instead, the story moves to Ann Arbor in the US. Then there is New York, which becomes instrumental in breaking off another relationship. The dark city lights of Baltimore are witness to Arindam questioning his morality and choices. There is in fact a whole relationship that develops along the question of who moves where when an Indian boy and an American girl fall in love.
The most striking display of geographical inequalities however comes during a slightly questionable relationship, when Arindam visits Bombay as a student and falls in love with an older woman, Komal. Knowing that this has no future, they go their separate ways and keep in touch intermittently. But when Komal witnesses her city falling siege to riots in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, a part of her breaks irreparably. Arindam admits that Bombay – Mumbai by the time he writes about it – is a city with far more heart than Delhi, which he admittedly “loves like his own mother”.
And thus, this part of Bombay’s heart that was broken had much more deep-reaching effects than one would assume. This arc between Komal and Arindam has a constant play between Delhi and Bombay, where the underlying (and in my opinion, true) insinuation is that Delhi clearly is less forgiving. It’s an arc I selfishly wish was explored more because of my infatuation with the capital, and how survival is a right earned in this city.
Lest I sound too appreciative, this is not to say the book doesn’t falter, and it does so sometimes by overdoing its own traits. More than half the book is spent talking about one relationship, but after a point, it seems like a repeat of what was already said before. I understand the desire of doing this was to mimic the time Arindam actually spends in each relationship, but this can make for somewhat disinterested reading at times. The most fascinating part of the various relationships Bagchi writes about is how they eventually break down, and in that, he doesn’t leave any stone unturned. But for an author with this level of clarity, perhaps both Bagchi and his readers deserved a crisper book.
Unknown City: A Novel, Amitabha Bagchi, HarperCollins India.
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