Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhuri

Remember those afternoons in the pre-Internet days when your head would sink in the lap of your grandmother and while stroking your hair, she would narrate tales of here-and-there to you. The stories would often be mundane but her animated telling and retelling would spice it up.

Afternoon Raag is a story that has been narrated in books before – about lonely students studying in a faraway land and pining for their country, but what makes you turn the pages are its brevity, and his poetic and lurid narration.

The 175-pages book, published by Penguin Books, with an aesthetic cover lures you to pick it up. Amit Chaudhuri is a classical singer from the North Indian Classical gharana and it shines through the book as he narrates about his affair with the quiet, pigeon-holed streets in London and with two different women—Mandira and Shehnaz.

A student from Calcutta in Oxford, the narrator misses the call of the crows in the busy streets of London, where shops are shut and opened on time, people with long overcoats fight the freezing temperature and to engage his lonely mind, he frequently indulges in nostalgia—his mother, who prepares insipid tea and learns music from a teacher who will pass away soon, his own stint with the Tanpura, his father, devouring the Times of India and RK Laxman cartoons, the Ambassador, his mother’s aerogrammes, his strolls around the streets and markets in public transportation and his bravado in teaching his classmate Sharma, English. I wished he had elaborated about Shehnaz  and Mandira, his two lovers that he is unapologetic about. He describes these affairs as prerequisite in a lonely place. I enjoyed reading about Sharma and his mother, the most.

  On the second day, I got a glimpse of Sharma in the dining room in the basement dressed up like a provincial colonial,      walking stiffly in a black suit I was never to see later, wearing it with the exact degree of painfulness that people do in the  sweltering tropics, managing to look hot in it even in a cold country.

The sensory details in the book are eloquent; you can hear music being stringed out as you read. Amit Chaudhuri is wary about hurting any sentiments and is generous in describing the Maharashtrians, the Tamilians, and the Hindi hinterland. Pick this book if you’ve lived in another country and made friends out of necessity and then enjoyed their company, like an acquired taste. 

Pick this book if you’ve missed your country and pined for it. Pick this book if you love eloquence in narration and enjoy traveling with the author, as he swivels you on his magic carpet of words and points out the scenes he has witnessed, within and outside.

The first day I arrived in Oxford, it was raining the fine, persistent, baby-like drizzle in which no one gets wet. Propelled and navigated by my suitcases, I found myself before a window in a centuries-old building which now run, in a mood of chicanery and make-believe, as a fully operational shelter for scores of bright-spirited graduates in sweaters and jeans.