Weight Loss By Upamanyu Chatterjee, Viking, Rs 495

Weight Loss is presented as a ?comedy of spiritual and sexual degradation?. But in typical Upamanyu Chatterjee style, this description stands as an understatement. For this comic-sardonic novel is about Bhola?s search for identity ? sexual, linguistic and metaphysical. Like his predecessor, Agastya Sen, Bhola is extremely intelligent, hypersensitive and a misfit. He is totally adrift and he jogs through the novel searching for the ?calm centre?. Yet he is never in a hurry because there always seems to be time for a hundred visions and revisions before dying at the absurdly young age of 37.

The first sentence of the novel announces, quoting Anthony, Bhola?s physical education teacher and his adolescent crush, ?Only when you die will you cease to feel ridiculous.? Towards the end of the novel, when his closest friend, Dosto, describes him as a joker, Bhola accepts it as a compliment. Bhola?s various sexual misadventures are extremely comic and he blunders through them like an idiot, but it is impossible to ignore the undercurrent of sadness and waste that runs through them. Most of his lovers belong to the lower orders, starting from Gopinath, the family cook. His affairs with them become attempts to wish away the barriers of class and caste. It is a feature of his rootlessness that we never get to know where exactly he lives or even his full name. Bhola?s fierce longing for all sorts of odd people becomes a strategy of weight loss ? an attempt to ?cut the crap? consisting of all the givens of existence and get at the essential nothingness. He is embarrassed by the simplicity of his search, yet this is what defines his being.

Inextricably connected with Bhola?s existential search is his search for a language in which he can satisfactorily explain himself. He speaks in English, is well versed in Sanskrit and hates Hindi. He teaches Gopinath how to write in English, communicates in the ?Hindi of the Bombay film? with Titli, and teaches Plato in Hindi to his college students. As an expression of her strange mix of unmotivated malice and insane mirth, Bhola?s friend, and later sister-in-law, Anin, is never heard speaking even one full sentence exclusively in one language. Anin is the complete antithesis of her sister, and Bhola?s wife, Kamala, who speaks little and instead pours out her soul in her ?heavenly melody?. Kamala, her songs, and their daughter, Karuna, come closest to representing the ?calm centre? of Bhola?s turning world. He wistfully lingers at its margins before his past catches up with him. Yet the separation from his family can hardly be termed retribution, since Bhola had never quite settled down in the smugness of conjugal life. There is an unmistakable strain of regret in the closing section of the novel, but there is also the sense that it could hardly have been otherwise. In the last day of his life, Bhola realizes anew that he needed nothing and that ?all things were best appreciated in their absence?.

Among the several delights offered by the novel are the literary allusions, especially to T.S. Eliot?s poetry, woven into Bhola?s discourse. Bhola starts off in the Sweeney mode and runs through the novel with ?Hurry up please its time? naggingly piping at the back. And the mood of wonder in the last page of the novel as Bhola dreams of his daughter, with life dribbling out of him, inevitably reminds one of ?Marina?. The child?s face, ?moon-like?, possesses a radiance against which the pysechedelic lights, the spiritual degradation seem unreal. Bhola?s life appears to grasp a meaning after all as he resigns his life, as if to live a new one in his daughter?s.

Like all of Chatterjee?s novels, Weight Loss too is characterized by black humour and a deadpan style. Yet the note of tenderness and empathy strikes a new chord. While Bhola laughs at his own presumptions and those of the world, he remains artlessly kind towards all. The ability to wrench a laugh out of every situation is described as an attribute of innocence and, indeed, Bhola remains a child till the end. His obsessive weight-loss programme ensures that he is always able to shed the burden of the expected from his life. One cannot help feeling that if Bhola?s tale remains a comedy, it is only because the world no longer admits of tragedies.