The Immortals;
By Amit Chaudhuri; Picador;
Pages: 405; Price: Rs 495
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The Immortals is a tale of growing up in the city of Bombay in the last quarter of the 20th century. It is the story of Nirmalya Sengupta, the sensitive, frail and lonely child of a successful corporate executive Apurva Sengupta who has relocated himself in Bombay after his early stint with the company at Calcutta. Nirmalya’s mother, Mallika Sengupta, is a singer of some talent and ambition who engages a number of music teachers in Bombay to continue developing her creative hobby, apart from attending to her household duties as the wife of a successful executive.
The novel opens with Mallika’s chance encounter with Shyamji who hails from a family with a distinguished lineage in music. It elaborates the growing proximity between the Senguptas and the extended clan of Shyamji, deftly provided for by the maestro through the commercial deployment of his musical skills. Shyamji, starting out as Mallika’s music teacher, makes cautious and judicious use of the patronage of Apurva Sengupta who gets elevated to the position of the Managing Director of his company. The narrative, unfolding in smooth episodic fragments, charts the progress in the lives of the members of these two families — one needy and upwardly mobile, the other successful and capable of dispensing favours. The plot alternates between “the material capriciousness of human existence” and “the miracle of song and its pleasure”.
Amit Chaudhuri’s selection of Budhadeva Bose’s poem “Transformation” as one of the epigraphs to his novel attests to his interest in teasing out the eternal in the transitoriness of the present. In so far as Nirmalya represents this quest for the abiding solace of art he is the author’s alter ego, someone who is trying to negotiate the puzzles of his creaturely existence through the agency of art and philosophy. He begins by rejecting the corporate values of his father’s world and subjects himself to a secret and demanding education in Indian music with the help of Shyamji and his motley assistants. His departure to England on a scholarship coinciding with a deepening sense of exile and a series of transformations in his situation at home leaves him poised on the brink of a new life and new definitions. Much like James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Nirmalya Sengupta is a rebel drifting in search of his special destiny and The Immortals is Chaudhuri’s foray into the world of the kunstlerroman. The artist’s “opening up …into solitariness and freedom” is something both Nirmalya and Stephen share.
One is struck by the placid surface of Chaudhuri’s narration, punctuated as it is by the occasional understated irony and the flow of well-orchestrated details. The details do not create a sense of clutter as in a Rushdie narrative. The inviolate privacy of the individual character set adrift in a material world remains almost intact. One gets the impression of the lambent suggestiveness of a still portrait. Occasionally, the odd detail about a character jolts the reader into a recognition of the buried self as in the anatomical description of the invincible politician, Hanuman Prasad Rao: “He had huge hands; he could easily have strangled someone with them.” And there is a certain restraint to Chaudhuri’s measured prose. It is rarely touched by hyperbole or boisterous garrulity. It builds by stringing words together unobtrusively, leaving the effect to work itself out on the reader in an undemonstrative fashion. What the reader gets is a deceptive sense of placidity, a feeling of at-home-ness — predictably punctured by the unforeseen intrusion of mortality.
The author is Professor, Department of English, Sambalpur University
Book Reviews 
The Immortals;
Amit Chaudhuri’s selection of Budhadeva Bose’s poem “Transformation” as one of the epigraphs to his novel attests to his interest in teasing out the eternal in the transitoriness of the present. In so far as Nirmalya represents this quest for the abiding solace of art he is the author’s alter ego, someone who is trying to negotiate the puzzles of his creaturely existence through the agency of art and philosophy. He begins by rejecting the corporate values of his father’s world and subjects himself to a secret and demanding education in Indian music with the help of Shyamji and his motley assistants. His departure to England on a scholarship coinciding with a deepening sense of exile and a series of transformations in his situation at home leaves him poised on the brink of a new life and new definitions. Much like James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Nirmalya Sengupta is a rebel drifting in search of his special destiny and The Immortals is Chaudhuri’s foray into the world of the kunstlerroman. The artist’s “opening up …into solitariness and freedom” is something both Nirmalya and Stephen share.
