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Title: Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life
Author: Upamanyu Chatterjee
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
It is the 20th of December 1980, a Saturday, and at dinner, Lorenzo Senesi, who will turn twenty-two in a little over a month, tells his mother, ‘Mamma, I think I just might go down to Padua with Roberto and Francesca for Christmas and the New Year. Should be back by the 3rd or 4th of January.’
Elda glances at her son but says nothing. Amedeo the father grunts once to acknowledge that the information has reached his ears. Paola, Lorenzo’s sister, older by fourteen months, asks in a tone that suggests that it wouldn’t matter if he doesn’t respond, ‘With those two? But I thought you were bored to death of them.’
The next morning, Lorenzo packs some essential things, including his copy of Carlo Carretto’s The Desert in the City, in an overnight bag, places the bag on the rear seat of his Renault 5, goes to the kennel in the corner of the garden to hug and nuzzle Vega the dog (a handsome golden-brown beast, half German Shepherd, a quarter Retriever, and in her reflective moments, there is something about her eyes that recalls the young Sylvester Stallone) and is off. Francesca and Roberto are nowhere to be seen. From Aquilinia, the dot on the outskirts of Trieste where they stay (a workers’ village, really, an adjunct to the Aquila oil refinery is how it was conceived and inaugurated in 1938, with habitual pomp, by Mussolini), he takes La Strada Costiera, the scenic coast road, down to the plains.
It is late in the morning, and bright and sunny. On his right lie the hummocks, ridges and undulations of karst, their eroded limestone continually sneaking a peek between the trees of lime and pine at the brilliant blue, on his left, of the bay of Trieste. The landscape tumbles down in leaps and bounds to the radiant sea that stretches like blue polythene till the haze of the horizon. On some curves, he can spot the white sails of boats, as still as life, on the aquamarine lapping at the feet of Miramare Castle.
The Renault, three years old, is an acquisition that dates from his road accident and the insurance money that he reaped as one of its consequences. It moves well; he makes good time to Sistiana and thence to Monfalcone where, having left the Adriatic and reached the bland plains, he takes the A 4 west-south-west towards Milan. He is undecided—but only for a moment—between the radio and the cassette player. Radio Punto Zero on FM wins; with his arms fully stretched to grip the steering wheel, he leans back in the seat to enjoy Adriano Celentano crooning ‘Il Tempo Se Ne Va’.
A hundred and fifty kilometres, more or less, to Padua, an uncluttered highway through the ploughed cornfields and plantations of poplar of the region of Gorizia; Celentano on the radio is succeeded by Franco Battiato, Giuni Russo, Antonello Venditti and Claudio Baglioni. Friuli-Venezia-Giulia gives way to the Veneto a while before Lorenzo switches off the radio to enjoy, in peace, the noon silence. At Padua, though, it not being his final destination, he still has a further fifteen kilometres to go to reach Praglia at the foot of the Euganean Hills.
He parks the Renault as far as he can from a bus disgorging a contingent of British tourists alongside the church wall of the Chiesa Abbaziale di Santa Maria Assunta and carrying his overnight bag, walks across to the arched recess in which is inset an iron door. It is the principal entrance to Praglia Abbey of which the church forms an integral part. He rings the bell and waits.
He glances back at his car. Behind the wall, the church rises solid and grey, monolithic like a fortress, almost forbidding. Hearing the clang and whine of the iron door being opened, he turns back.
The monk whom he sees, Father Anselmo, sombre in his black robe, is tiny. He smiles and nods at Lorenzo and ushers him in. ‘Oh, have you come by car? Then I’ll open the main gates for you so that you can park inside.’ Without ceasing to nod and smile, he ushers him out.
Father Anselmo, being the porter of the abbey, is a statutory requirement of the institution. Let there be stationed at the monastery gate, says Chapter 66 of the Rule of Saint Benedict, a wise and elderly monk who knows how to receive an answer and to give one and whose ripeness of years does not suffer him to wander about. This porter ought to have his cell close to the gate so that those who come may always find someone there from whom they can get an answer. So when the Father does not reply, it may be presumed that the question was not worth a response. For they do not speak much, the Benedictines.
The Renault having found its parking berth in a spacious, paved, open corridor that runs right around a large, rectangular garden, Lorenzo returns to the reception room where Father Anselmo, at his place behind a plain, unadorned desk, waits for him.
‘Good afternoon,’ he starts again formally. ‘I would like to meet the maestro dei novizi. I have an appointment. My name is Lorenzo Bonifacio.’
A cue, as it were, for Father Anselmo to nod and smile again, and without getting up, lean sideways in his chair and press, six times in a measured, definite code, a red plastic button affixed to the wall. One push of the bell, a long pause, two pushes, a short pause, two more pushes, a long pause, one last push. Immediately, from the great bell tower of the church, clearly audible in each nook and cranny of the abbey, begins to ring, in the same code and with the same pauses, one of the lesser bells. Father Anselmo then gestures to Lorenzo to sit down in one of the chairs ranged along the wall. No conversation ensues.
(Extracted from Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life by Upamanyu Chatterjee. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2024)
About the Book
One summer morning in 1977, nineteen-year-old Lorenzo Senesi of Aquilina, Italy, drives his Vespa motor-scooter into a speeding Fiat and breaks his forearm. It keeps him in bed for a month, and his boggled mind thinks of unfamiliar things: Where has he come from? Where is he going? And how to find out more about where he ought to go?
When he recovers, he enrols for a course in physiotherapy. He also joins a prayer group, and visits Praglia Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in the foothills outside Padua.
The monastery will become his home for ten years, its isolation and discipline the anchors of his life, and then send him to a Benedictine ashram in faraway Bangladesh—a village in Khulna district, where monsoon clouds as black as night descend right down to river and earth. He will spend many years here. He will pray seven times a day, learn to speak Bengali and wash his clothes in the river, paint a small chapel, start a physiotherapy clinic to ease bodies out of pain, and fall, unexpectedly, in love. And he will find that a life of service to God is enough, but that it is also not enough.
A study of the extraordinary experiences of an ordinary man, a study of both the majesty and the banality of the spiritual path, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s new novel is a quiet triumph. It marks a new phase in the literary journey of one of India’s finest and most consistently original writers.
About the Author
Upamanyu Chatterjee is the author of English August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), Weight Loss (2006), Way to Go (2011), Fairy Tales at Fifty (2014), and Villainy (2022)—all novels; The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian (2018), a novella; and The Assassination of Indira Gandhi (2019), a collection of long stories.
In 2000, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award, and in 2008, he was awarded the Order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for his contribution to literature.
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