(Upamanyu Chatterjee and a scene from English August)
Upamanyu Chatterjee's fourth book,Weight Loss has just hit the book shelves and all national magazines,whetther it be India Today or The Outlook,have carried articles on the book in their latest issues.As i read these articles, i felt certain emotions resurging in my heart, certain memories resurfacing in my mind. they are ineffable but what i can do say about them is that i first experienced them nearly five years ago when i had read Chatterjee's debut novel,English August the first time. needless to say,like hundreds of other seventeen-year olds who have read it,i fell head over heels in love with Agasthya Sen, the most famous fictional bureaucrat of india.so many years later, when i once again felt that adolescent excitement and elation, the thought struck me that maybe, my euphoria wil be heightened if i allow my fancy to go wild and write about what was missing in an otherwise absolutely rivetting and adorable novel:Agasthya's love life.
imagine- i told this to myself-what shhould be thenature of the girl who would win August's love? he has been an anglophile since his school days in Darjeeling, for him indian country side is nothing more than 'miles and miles of familiar bt unknown hinterland',he has the appearence of a porn film actor,he says lies without an iota of hesitation, he is at times irreverant in the most outrageous ways and hence, as a character in the novel describes him, is 'the English type. yet,if he was to fall in love in the novel-and i have brooded over it myraid of times-it would be with some one whose trysts with and admiration for the intellectual as well as the popular cultures of the West has not turned her cynic of everything indian.
She had to be a bureacrat like him other wise how could they havemet in the novel which was such a brilliant crique of Indian Babudom,babus and their whims and caprices.
Except intellectually, she had to be,for literary excitement, an antipode of August.Reticent,truthful and innately simple,she would have struck August as someone so different from all the pretentious and hum-bug spewing friends he had had in life.
She could have never been someone astoundingly pretty. Had she been so,then there would have no scope for describing how August's initial insouciance for her gave way to admiration for her subtle charms and dreamy dispositiion.
Naturally, she would have been liked by both the gentle-hearted father of August, the Governor and his irascible and cynical but idealistic uncle, Poltu kaka.
She and August, in my fantasy, would have met in Madna itself at some government function where in the midst of insufferable shameless hangers-on and equally pompous babus; they would appeared to each other as exceptions.
Finally, what would have been the name of this woman with whom an unrelenting cynic and -i feel- even iconoclast like Agasthya Sen aka August aka English would have madly and perpetually in love?
Well,.....i would like Mr.Chatterjee suggest one. ihope he approves of young August falling in love. He needs to understand that girls will be girls and i am a girl who cannot bear to think of her favourite literary character and first crush leading a life devoid of true love!
