Song of India

By GAIUTRA BAHADUR

THE IMMORTALS

By Amit Chaudhuri

340 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95

Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel, a comedy of manners set in 1980s India, centers on the teenage scion of a corporate family who neither dresses nor acts the part. Instead, Nirmalya Sengupta, in his uniform of faded kurta and jeans, a copy of Will Durant’s “Story of Philosophy” as totem, takes the bus home from school while his father’s Mercedes follows at a discreet distance.

A devotee of Indian classical music, the boy is intent on defending this tradition against the threat of commercialism. As it happens, ragas run in the blood of both the protagonist of “The Immortals” and its author. Chaudhuri is not only a devotee of Hindustani music, but also a professional musician with several releases to his credit. (He sings his own compositions on a recent experimental album cheekily titled “This Is Not Fusion.”) Like his main character, Chaudhuri was tutored by a songstress mother and a beloved Rajasthani guru. And the biographical symmetries don’t stop with the music. Chaudhuri lends Nirmalya his own health condition (a heart murmur), his own cosmopolitan identity (as a Bengali raised in Bombay — now Mumbai — and schooled in London) and the addresses of his own youth (the Senguptas retire from a luxury high-rise in downtown Bombay to Bandra, which at the time was on the frontier of the feverishly growing city, a suburb of churches and gulmohar trees where the Chaudhuris also lived).

But none of these parallels protect Nirmalya from the wry, knowing authorial tone that makes the book so pleasurable, despite the sparseness of its plot. In one scene, the Senguptas go for tea to the Leela Penta Hotel, an oasis of glass and palm trees at Bombay’s marshy edge. Nirmalya, glancing at the wasteland outside, notices a boy “squinting and squatting on the edge of a metal cylinder.” Chaudhuri, a maestro of intimation, then shifts the focus: “ ‘I can’t eat here,’ Nirmalya said, shaking his head slowly, the boyish face little more than a child’s in spite of the moustache, full of inexplicable hurt, the eyes almost tearful. ‘I can’t eat here until Shyamji is able to eat here.’ ” His parents indulgently follow him out, “with a conviction that they were doing the only logical and admissible thing . . . Mrs. Sengupta glancing tolerantly, without emotion, at the tray of cakes.”

Shyamji is the boy’s teacher, respected but also judged by him for squandering his artistic inheritance as the son of a gifted classical musician. Shyamji must earn a living, so he neglects his own career to tutor the rich — including Nirmalya’s mother, a talented singer who has settled for being the dilettante wife of a business executive. Shyamji comes with a clan of accompanists who press the Senguptas for loans but also befriend them. Gently and elusively, like the glow of a firefly, Chaudhuri’s irony lights up the complex status negotiations in the dark space that exists between the two families. Are Nirmalya and his mother disciples or employers? Who is due more respect, the Brahmin teacher or his students, who are of lower caste but are clearly his social betters? Was it the sight of a boy possibly defecating outside or a democratic concern for his guru’s dining options that made Nirmalya leave the Leela Penta Hotel?

It’s possible that he rejects the hotel before it can reject his guru. Even so, we guess that his sensitivity may be another affectation, like the long hair and grungy goatee he ultimately cuts off in London or his public transport habit in Bombay, “his way of briefly, innocently, taking on a disguise, of insinuating himself into the life of the multitude.”

Chaudhuri is clearsighted about what is closest to him, and he is candid without being cynical about the class of aspirants who have made India a global economic player. “The Immortals” confirms his reputation as a gifted miniaturist. Nothing much happens in this book, but its elegant sentences and dry, discerning portraits more than compensate.

Gaiutra Bahadur is at work on a book about the women who migrated from India to the West Indies as “coolies.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Bahadur-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3