KALKATTA By Kunal Basu, Picador, Rs 599

They say that it's only after you've moved away from a relationship, a place or anything of value, which had you wrapped up within it, that your sense of recall and concurrent acuity is stronger than it ever had been. There are exceptions, naturally, but for most of us, the present binds itself tightly around us and what matters then are customarily the aspects of here and now. Afterwards, when you return to what once was, new insights are glimpsed that are, arguably, deeper and more well defined. This is particularly true when it comes to cities because they are mostly strangers to themselves. They are powered by variant urgencies and generate dissimilar value systems with the passage of time. As a matter of fact, they keep changing their faces the moment you look away. The quality of your relationship with your city is determined by what you want from it. This you at least understand when you choose to revisit it in your own fashion. Calcutta was Kunal Basu's city. He was born and lived his adolescence there, first imbibing the value systems of a marginally traditional joint family which prided itself on its sanity, then sorting out his dialectics at the university, within the campus and outside it on the streets, finally to leave the city and country to find a future. He kept coming back though on short, sometimes enigmatic, visits and when he wrote his first book, many of its people interfaced with the city. In this, his sixth book, his characters don't interface with the city; they are its face. It had, therefore, required a certain mindset to reimagine a Calcutta which wasn't as he had left it, nor were its people easily identifiable from the past. Perhaps in such situations the writer thinks up a few archetypal hooks and hopes that she can pin her story on them to create places that her readers will want to visit. A risky business for sure, this using the city to explain its people and alongside this, getting such people to define their city. Viewed in this light, Kalkatta is more discovery than disaster.

The story tells of Jami, a teenage Bihari immigrant from Bangladesh, who crosses the porous border into West Bengal with his family, helped by the machinations of an uncle who is a regional satrap within the Communist Party in Calcutta. Uncle Mushtak places the family in the intriguing Number 14 on Zakaria Street, a predominantly Muslim, north-central precinct of the city where the home grown populace has grudgingly accepted a flush of immigrants and where the relationships are vulnerable, though Kunal doesn't spend too much time examining this. He sees, instead, the hard-edged expediencies that grow here from jeopardy and chance and places the family within this milieu. Kunal's books are not quick-fixes and he belongs to an authorship which spends a lot of time, effort and resources to give them authenticity and relevance. Likewise, readers spend their money, time even effort on a book, and I heard myself whispering, get on with it. Anyway, after what I thought was an inordinately long first segment with much gratuitous detailing, he takes Jami out from Zakaria Street and into the other Calcutta which the young man has briefly encountered till then - the flyovers, the eateries, the football matches on the Maidan when Mohammedan Sporting are playing (though there seems to be a time warp here). The story drives forward from here; Jami's working in a travel agency which suggests impropriety, his meeting a certain Mrs Goswami, who would now be called a cougar, a series of encounters which, I felt, sometimes bordered on the unreal, and her getting him into a massage parlour, cleverly named Champak, where the front office manager of sorts is the transgender Rita, who likes him and tells him how it should be, massages and beyond. Jami is a quick learner and also possessed of raging hormones. Champak is described in exquisite detail, the sights, the smells, the sounds, and the gentle sleaze. From there it's a predictable step into places where the glitterati gather and lonely women and men with money to spare size him up and book time with him. In this, what is the second segment of his book, Kunal presents the Brechtian paradox of an interplay between his innocent, but not routinely pliable, protagonist and a tainted mise en scène where neither bad luck nor bad judgment is likely to be excused. I am reminded of Willard Motley's 1947 cult novel, Knock On Any Door which dwelt upon a similar paradigm. I am not suggesting that Kalkatta has followed Motley's work; it hasn't because Kunal has his own set of realities. It's just that Jami's need to escape, his seeming deliverance and ultimate obliteration are the novel's avowals. If I remember, the doomed Nick Romano's credo was "[L]ive fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse!" By this time, Kunal has more or less iconized Kalkatta and given it a universality.

The third segment of Kalkatta lends the book its true weight and substance. Jami finds himself being drawn towards the leukaemia stricken Pablo, the young son of his friend from the travel agency, who she is struggling to shield from the inevitable. It could initially have been his appeal for the seemingly poised, firmly middle class single mother, a Kalkattawalli from the leafy south of the city, but as the dreadful disease wracks the boy, Jami's compulsions change. The boy, or the disease, draws Jami inexorably into the circle of mother and child and chemotherapy. As his other life slips away, he faces the prospect of grabbing things he had refused to touch earlier - joining the drug and kidney rackets of his Zakaria-Street friend, Rakib, for instance - anything to get the money to pay for Pablo's critical care. Life grins at him wolfishly from the dark street corners as he struggles to cope with changing realities. The half-bodied mongrel in Pinaki De's extraordinary cover turns around and bites. The book ends here.

A reader may want a book to end in a particular manner; the author, though, may end it differently and a book such as this is so acutely private that it's bound to generate conflicting opinions and estimations, relating to both form and content. However, what Kalkatta will certainly do for you is this; when late into a night you next hear the seductive tinkle of a rickshaw puller's bell, it's beckoning you from where you happen to be, and into this inimitable city, of savagery and soul.