Calcutta native Mukherjee ( The Lives of Others) illuminates the crevices of shame and despair with his beautiful prose. at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and graduated with an M.A. He studied English at Jadavpur University and then attended University College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he studied English and graduated in 1992. Interspersed throughout the book are installments of Ritwik’s own forays into fiction, imagining one Miss Maud Gilby: a minor character from a Tagore novel and an intrepid, early 20th-century British woman intent on educating Indian women. ISBN: 9788184007121 Length : 400 Pages MRP : 599. Mukherjee was educated at Don Bosco School, Park Circus, Kolkata. Throughout this time, which is set in the early days of AIDS, Ritwik finds men with whom he can have brief, furtive encounters in bathroom stalls and on unlit backstreets, never learning their names, never allowing himself affection or trust. Ritwik is unable to shake the trauma of his mother’s cruelty, punishing himself once she no longer can.
His loneliness follows him to rainy rural England, where a scholarship gets him two years in university, and then on to London, where he stays without working papers. (Ali Smith) There are a lot of subtle cultural ironies in Neel Mukherjees debut novel, which is what makes the book such a delight.
Following his mother’s death, and soon after his father’s, protagonist Ritwik is surprised to find himself entirely alone in his Calcutta neighborhood at age 21, not nearly as happy as he’d hoped he’d be with his mother gone (she was both the “proudest” mother in the area and, seemingly, the most abusive, “always on the edge of fury,” if not in its throes).
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