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A review by rukmini
English, August: An Indian Story by Upamanyu Chatterjee
5.0
'How old are you, sir?'
'Twenty-eight.'Agastya was twenty-four, but he was in a lying mood. He also disliked their faces.
'Are you married, sir?' Again that demand that he classify himself. Ahmed leaned forward for each question, neck tensed and head angled with politeness.
'Yes.' He wondered for a second whether he should add 'twice'.
'And your Mrs, sir?' Agarwal's voice dropped at 'Mrs'; in all those months all references to wives were in hushed, almost embarrassed, tones. Agastya never knew why, perhaps because to have a wife meant that one was fucking, which was a dirty thing.
'She's in England. She's English, anyway, but she's gone there for a cancer operation. She has cancer of the breast.' He had an almost uncontrollable impulse to spread out his fingers to show the size of the tumour and then the size of the breast, but he decided to save that for later. Later in his training he told the District Inspector of Land Records that his wife was a Norwegian Muslim.
Agastya Sen ('August' to his school friends) is twenty-four when he drifts into the Indian Administrative Service, mostly because he can't think of anything else he wants to do. The novel describes his year of training in small-town India. Horny, supercilious, and a little too clever for his own good, August spends his time in Madna getting stoned, masturbating constantly and lying inventively about his background.
I couldn't stop laughing through the first half of this book. The langauge is rich and creative; Chatterjee excels in juxtaposing words and phrases in ways that startle laughter out of the reader.
The book is also surprisingly affecting when it describes August's loneliness and disorientation. More than that, it speaks to the identity crisis that many middle-class Indian kids go through at one point or another: when your first language is English and everything around you reminds you of something you've read in a foreign book, how authentic an Indian are you?
'Twenty-eight.'Agastya was twenty-four, but he was in a lying mood. He also disliked their faces.
'Are you married, sir?' Again that demand that he classify himself. Ahmed leaned forward for each question, neck tensed and head angled with politeness.
'Yes.' He wondered for a second whether he should add 'twice'.
'And your Mrs, sir?' Agarwal's voice dropped at 'Mrs'; in all those months all references to wives were in hushed, almost embarrassed, tones. Agastya never knew why, perhaps because to have a wife meant that one was fucking, which was a dirty thing.
'She's in England. She's English, anyway, but she's gone there for a cancer operation. She has cancer of the breast.' He had an almost uncontrollable impulse to spread out his fingers to show the size of the tumour and then the size of the breast, but he decided to save that for later. Later in his training he told the District Inspector of Land Records that his wife was a Norwegian Muslim.
Agastya Sen ('August' to his school friends) is twenty-four when he drifts into the Indian Administrative Service, mostly because he can't think of anything else he wants to do. The novel describes his year of training in small-town India. Horny, supercilious, and a little too clever for his own good, August spends his time in Madna getting stoned, masturbating constantly and lying inventively about his background.
I couldn't stop laughing through the first half of this book. The langauge is rich and creative; Chatterjee excels in juxtaposing words and phrases in ways that startle laughter out of the reader.
The book is also surprisingly affecting when it describes August's loneliness and disorientation. More than that, it speaks to the identity crisis that many middle-class Indian kids go through at one point or another: when your first language is English and everything around you reminds you of something you've read in a foreign book, how authentic an Indian are you?