Ten or more years ago the famous Bengali author Sunil Gangopadhyay had a long travelogue serialised in the Calcutta daily, Anandabazar Patrika. If I remember correctly the title of that travelogue was Chobir Deshe Kobitar Deshe, a simple translation of which would be – In the Land of Painting and Poetry. The travelogue was about his journeys in France, the people he met there, the culture, the colours, the associations with literature and art. It used to be published on Sundays and I preserved every clipping. At this time, I was drifting among strange professions, celebrating that lightness, spooked to my bones by a future which seemed dangerously predictable. I was discovering Calcutta with young poets and painters - roaming her streets at night, arguing with zealous policemen about the right to remain drunk for ever, sparring (a bit bookishly) with friends about artists and art. I was also doing a bit of writing (book reviews, middles and stuff), some of it in newspapers like the The Statesman and The Telegraph. That was when the idea of a novel came to my mind and I immediately filled fifty pages with thoughts that were still unprepared to be words. But then I lost my way and life intervened with its bag of tricks. The project did not take off again till much later, when I was in the midst of a responsible but exciting job in a non-government organisation. I was travelling a lot; to France, America and other places. And the routines of that job, somehow, bred in me a discipline of writing regularly. That helped. I used to harbour an innocent admiration for the French and their country. Some of it may have come to me from literature, some perhaps from my first French teacher Eric Blandin at Alliance Française de Calcutta. When Jacques Derrida came to speak at the Calcutta book fair, Eric presented me with a photo of the linguist and a book on French philosophers. And Sunil Gangopadhyay’s delicious prose had already cast its spell. By then I knew what my book would be about.
© Rajat Chaudhuri. All rights reserved
