Past Continuous By Neel Mukherjee, Picador, Rs 495

There is a bitterness — almost savage in its quality — about Neel Mukherjee’s debut novel that wrenches the reader out of his comfort zone. The only way to engage with this book would have to be from the gut-level. The beginning is familiar. The mother’s funeral. You think of Camus’s Meursault, you think of Bibhutibhushan’s Apu. As Ritwik waits before the electric furnaces of the Kalighat crematorium in Calcutta, his mind — and the narrative — does not become a montage of childhood and adolescent memories of the mother. Like Meursault, he goes through the “bristling panoply of rituals”, watching neighbours, relatives and street scenes.

The death of a parent induces a certain numbness. But in Ritwik’s case, his mother’s death, within days of his father’s, sets him free. In Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Aparajito, Apu feels something similar after he comes back to Nishchindipur and performs his mother’s last rites. It is a realization that comes shrouded in guilt for Apu. Ritwik feels no guilt. He only knows that he must escape the “festering mediocrity” of his life in the city.

At the epicentre of the mediocrity lies the tiny flat on Grange Road, belonging to Ritwik’s mother’s side of the family, which he has been forced to call home ever since his parents moved into it with him and his younger brother. The memories that deny him refuge at the crematorium but pour out in an acid trickle afterwards emanate from this flat. They form a violent collage — petty squabbles by day and ugly fights by night, Ritwik’s maternal uncles bashing up each other and sometimes their mother, but above all, his mother taking out all her frustration and anger on him.

The memories of violence come back to Ritwik even after he ‘escapes’ to Oxford. So does his mother. The vision of the dead mother on the armchair in his room would have made Norman Bates happy, but it terrifies Ritwik, makes him lose control of his bladder. At Oxford, he drifts from Shakespeare and Keats and Dr Carter’s tutorials, to sharing a joint and some Calcutta stories with fellow student Gavin, to furtive gay sex in public toilets — preoccupations and actions characterized by purposelessness and disaffection. If his past in Calcutta was steeped in squalor and caught in the web of little lies told to friends at his posh English-medium school, Ritwik’s present in Oxford is about a strange loneliness of the soul. All he cares about is to not lose the cover of anonymity that England gives him, to not have to revisit the dreariness of the past.

The act that gives Ritwik some satisfaction is writing. He is writing — though the reader is not told this until late into the novel — the story of Maud Gilby, who appears in a cameo in Tagore’s Ghare Baire, as Bimala’s English teacher and companion. Miss Gilby’s story, or rather, Ritwik’s ‘telling’ of it, runs parallel to Ritwik’s own Bildungsroman through the length of Past Continuous. And this causes a problem. It is understandable that the author wished to make “two flight-paths cross”, but the two birds fly at widely different speeds. After the fourth chapter of Miss Gilby’s story — which is just before she enters the household of Nikhilesh and Bimala — I stopped following its thread completely and concentrated on Ritwik. Once through with it, it was more rewarding to come back to finish the early-20th-century tale than having it interrupt, and get interrupted by, the Indo-Anglian journey of Ritwik.

This is not to say that the attempt to write back at Tagore’s novel is without its merits. The life of Miss Gilby prior to her appointment as Bimala’s teacher is a happy blend of historical research and imagination. Once the gentle British lady lands up at Dighi Bari in Nawabgunj, however, Mukherjee (or should it be Ritwik?) merely puts down her version of the events outlined by Tagore (who does radical experiments with multiple narratorial voices).

In any case, Miss Gilby’s raison d’être in the novel is not to help the author create his portrait of the artist as a young man. Her story holds clues to — and is, in turn, fed by — the one relationship that lends some beauty and meaning to Ritwik’s life — his relationship with the old and frail Anne Cameron. Anne happens to Ritwik soon after his student visa in England expires, rendering him “a virtual prisoner in this new land”, without access to the benefits of the welfare state. Gavin’s offer of bed and board in lieu of caring for Anne Cameron in Brixton, London, comes as a godsend to him. It also lifts the novel to a different plane, and there is no greater evidence of it than in the prose, particularly in the descriptions of Anne in the bath, or flitting between lucidity and incoherence.

It is the incontinent, amnesiac Anne who carries the novel on the brittle bones of her shoulders. She holds out the promise of exorcising Ritwik’s ghosts, by letting him see her own ghosts. Fumbling across the real and imagined elements of her speech, Ritwik learns about her son who had shot himself dead at thirty-two. Her son’s love for birds becomes an obsession with Anne, who frightens Ritwik by teetering out into the garden, ostensibly looking for a rare bird. She was in India during the raj, and Ruth, her ornithologist friend from those days, gets transposed into Ritwik’s story of Miss Gilby. Anne herself is a link to Ritwik’s novel, but Mukherjee does not quite reveal whether the link is imagined, or merely ‘discovered’, by Ritwik.

The most moving image in the novel is of Anne floating into Ritwik’s bedroom and switching off the bedside lamp. Ritwik, startled and feeling vulnerable, shouts at her and demands an explanation. As Anne goes away without answering, Ritwik breaks down, “wiping his snot and helpless tears on the sleeve of the torn and threadbare blue kurta his mother gave him six years ago”.

Past Continuous is inescapably about mothers and sons, but also about the difficulty and futility of looking for a pattern in lived experience. Ritwik’s sexual encounters — with boys cruised from King’s Cross or the wealthy Arab arms-dealer who likens him to his son — can only heighten his sense of alienation, though they also push him to walk the mean streets obsessively. Without revealing the end here, it may be said that the culmination belies all promises of redemption, if ever there were any. The jigsaw comes close to sorting itself out, but stops short. Ritwik has, after all, never been comfortable with expectations, not even his own.

The novel has power and a rawness of feeling, and one can almost sense the emotional drain it must have been to the novelist. It could have been slimmer, though, had Mukherjee not got carried away by Rajput history and swadeshi advertisements in Miss Gilby’s narrative.