Amit Chaudhuri is one of the best Indian writers in English today.
Salman Rushdie may be more flamboyant, but when it comes to describing
a scene, Chaudhuri is second to none. He can be as vivid as a
photograph or a video. The only reason he is not better known is his
short stories and novels are not ambitious in scope: they are more like
subtle miniatures than epics. But Chaudhuri, who teaches creative
writing at the University of East Anglia, has won several literary
awards. See Amit Chaudhuri for more details. Praising him, the Guardian said:
Yes,
he writes about India, but not the Technicolor romps British readers
have come to expect since Midnight's Children. Mr Chaudhuri's work is
better, and more truthful, than that…
Here's an extract
from A Strange and Sublime Address, which won the Commonwealth Writers
Prize for Best First Book in 1991. It's set in Calcutta (Kolkata),
where Chaurdhuri was born. Here he is describing three little boys
looking out of a window and watching pigeons mating. They are too young
to know what the birds are up to. The details are fascinating. It's both poetic and funny.
On
the far side of the parapet, while the rest dreamed, two pigeons began
to kiss each other in a solemnly painful manner, beaks locked together,
heads moving up and down simultaneously as if they were trying to
release themselves from the mysterious lock. It was a strange kind of
passion; it was the only way birds could embrace, or come close to
embracing — locking their beaks in that funny, tortured way. Finally,
the male climbed on the female's back and proceeded to flap its wings
in an abstracted fashion. The female waited, bending its head in a
world-weary manner.
