Review: Calcutta: Two Years in the City

Amit Chaudhuri has grown from a writer with humour to one in love with excess words. Dilip D’Souza reads out loud.

Calcutta, especially, leaves you puzzled, groaning and ultimately, just baffled. Yet, if you read both books, there’s a certain epiphany to be had.

I’ll return to that.

For now, consider: “The problem of sexuality gives to [EM Forster’s fiction]… its modernist disquiet, its obsession with duplication, alterity, otherness, and with echoes.”

Consider: the “decorative peacock feather [that] was still”, and “that stillness comprises, for me, an inalienable continuity with the child who first observed this world of relatives”.