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 ope...