Between worlds

The first surprise on reading Amit Chaudhuri's A New World is that, unlike novels from the new-generation of Indian writers, you can hold the book in one hand. The second surprise is that it is virtually plotless: Bengali economist resident in the US - arranged marriage recently ended - returns with seven-year old son to spend summer with parents in Calcutta. Most surprising of all is that it should prove so hypnotic. Yet via Chaudhuri's elliptical prose and Proustian sense of place, the heat-dominated world of Jay Chatterjee and his retired parents - a largely aimless meander from the banal to the mundane - insinuates itself without trick or fuss into our own.

A New World is Chaudhuri's fourth novel, the first three, (equally slim) have just won the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, published in one volume as Freedom Song, the title of the third. Although set in India, all four books address "the experience of estrangement, of the ordinary, of the familiar seeming unfamiliar". In A Strange and Sublime Address, which in 1992 won the UK-based Betty Trask Award for a first novel, Chaudhuri looked at estrangement from a child's perspective, "from the point of view of wonder". The boy who has grown up in Bombay visits his uncle and cousins in Calcutta. Having been brought up in "an upper-middle class" family environment in Bombay, he visits his uncle in Calcutta, who "belongs to a more middle-middle class background".

In all Chaudhuri's work, class, caste, money and generational divide rub against each other like boats at uneasy anchorage. In A New World, there is the world of a Bengali Brahmin family - their caste denoted by the name: Chatterjee. The father is a former rear-admiral, the son an academic, while the grandson has that newest of Indian identities - he is American. Estrangement and displacement move centre stage. Although the narrative is firmly fixed in a 1960s apartment block in present day Calcutta, the US is a constant presence, as oppressive as it is unseen, like the enfeebling heat itself. We meet in Oxford, where Chaudhuri, his wife and two-year-old daughter are staying for a few weeks. To be educated in England was always the ambition of bright Bengali boys before Silicon Valley opened up the American dream. Three years at University College, London, were followed by a year back in Calcutta while Chaudhuri applied for his D.Phil at Oxford and began his first novel. Now he lives there permanently.

He was never tempted by the ex-pat life, he says, he was too homesick for India. "I missed sunlight and I missed people on the streets. I missed windows being open. I missed all those things which basically make one's consciousness of life a very different thing in India than it is over here." The Oxford experience became the basis for After- noon Raag, published in 1993.

While England may not have had the climate he craved, in other respects, it was a familiar place, the natural consequence of generations of cross-cultural fertilisation. The US post-silicon experience has proved very different, however. Whereas Indian immigrants to England were, by and large, traders, shopkeepers, and subject to working-class racial discrimination, emigration to the US has been largely from among educated professionals, Chaudhuri explains. "More and more of my friends, and more importantly, more and more members of my own family are now in America. People go as students and stay on and do exceptionally well." Yet there is a huge cultural divide. Economically, all may be well, but he says, they feel "genuinely out of place", particularly in small-town America.

"I used to notice my cousins when they came back, the change in the rhythms of their lives and the children being very different from Indian children, even English children. I found it very intriguing how these lives were completely transplanted and changed by this migration. "And it seems to me as if migration had brought an element of the mythic into our day-to-day mundane bourgeois lives, of watching television, sending greeting cards, going to the doctor. It's almost as if we had been metamorphosed as we might have been in a mythic age, when amazing distances were being covered and you would have one kind of life colliding with another. "

Divorce, he says, has only added to this "mythic" dislocation. "Because permanent separation from someone you love is something I associate with mythical literature. The mental picture I have of bourgeois life is the 1950s happy family etc. And now in a time when no one believes in fate, in the unpredictable, or that human life is basically not in our control, along comes divorce, fate. And it causes permanent separation. "This overlapping of what I can only call the mythic, the experience of great movement from one place to another and the experience of permanent separation between mother and son or husband and wife, occurs in the banal day to day life of the middle classes. And America seems part of that experience."

The New World is Chaudhuri's least autobiographical novel in that he has never lived in the US, nor did he go to boarding school. Like the boy in A Strange and Sublime Address, Chaudhuri is Bengali but grew up and went to school in Bombay, on the other side of the sub-continent, because that was where his father worked, for 27 years, for a large corporation. His love of literature came directly from his parents - most obviously from his mother, he says. His own parents are a generation younger than the family portrayed in The New World and there was no question for Chaudhuri of an arranged marriage. "The ethos in which I grew up was that it was ridiculous." (Paradoxically, he says, an arranged marriage has itself become an act of rebellion among some of the educated classes. ) The curious mix of English and Bengali that his characters speak at home, was, and is, how people converse in an educated Indian household. It is no hangover from the past, nor is it affectation, it is just what everybody does.

India has always been multilingual because you had the Moghuls, you had Sanskrit, then Persian, Brajpasha - that is a literary language - then there are the regional languages, Gujrati, Bengali. People are always aware of more than one language. I don't want to make this sound very colourful because it is not. Our daily lives are most boring, but people are always aware of more than one language, that's been going on for centuries."

No one is confused by it, he says. It's just part of your mental process, "it's the way you think, the way you talk. Of course if you want to become a fundamentalist about these issues, you could say an entire sentence in Bengali, or an entire sentence in English. But the natural thing, is this amphibian-like existence between two elements."

A New World is published by Picador