Political is personal

If you grew up in a small town in the 1970s, studied in a convent school, and later wended your way to college and hostel in Delhi University, this book will be a nostalgic one — whether it is for the smell of Lakme egg shampoo (long ago swamped by L'Oreal), choir practice, or parathas at the P G Women's hostel canteen. Yet this is a novel more ambitious than a coming of age saga, the usual bildungsroman; it is also a kunstlerroman, a portrait of an artist. This accounts for the book's structure: the first three sections are in the protagonist's voice, the next are extracts from his first book, and the last section is from the point of view of his ex-lover. These narrative strategies, though simply constructed, invest the protagonist with a certain significance.

Ritwik Ray grows up in Patna, and will eventually make a choice to return and work there. In some ways, it is Patna that is the protagonist of this book. However much you can imagine transposing the action onto another small town or city, Chowdhury's strength is his sure and concrete relationship with the place where he locates his novel. While he peels away the layers of the pretensions and hypocrisies of the benighted middle classes, he also sketches, with compassion, a portrait of a place sunk in cultural torpor and riven with caste antagonisms. Simultaneously, the author charts some of the major political movements in this country since the 1970s: that of Jay Prakash Narayan, the Naxal revolution, the Mandal agitations.