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Excerpt

New Novel by Upamanyu Chatterjee

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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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Paean To Peace Slices from Life

Magic of the Mahatma & Nabendu

Ratnottama Sengupta shows the impact of Gandhi and his call for non-violence on her father, Nabendu Ghosh as she continues to emote over his message of Ahimsa and call for peace amidst rioting

The ferocity and senselessness of riots — Nabendu Ghosh had personal experience of both. In his autobiography, Eka Naukar Jatri (Dey’s Publication, 2008, Journey of a Lonesome Boat), he writes at length about grappling with the riots that had rocked Calcutta, Bengal — nay, the entire Subcontinent on 16th August 1946. 

The Direct Action Day call was given out by Mohammad Ali Jinnah to press the demand for a separate Muslim State, Pakistan. The epicentre was Calcutta, a flourishing centre of business and education, that had Suhrawardy of Muslim League as its chief minister. On that black Friday, they unleashed unprecedented bloodletting along communal lines. At least 4000 deaths were reported on the very first day of the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ that continued for more than four days. Many women were raped, many were kidnapped, many killed and hung naked in public areas… Dismemberment, forced conversion, bustees set on fire… Violence spread to Khulna in East Bengal, and Bihar. Within a year the hatred ignited on religious grounds culminated in the Partition of India.

The savagery of the mindless bloodbath had left such a deep dent on the yet-to-be-thirty writer, that he wrote a number of stories and novels on the theme: Phears Lane, Dweep, Trankarta, Ulukhar, ‘Chaaka’(Full Circle), and ‘Gandhiji.

 Gandhiji builds majorly on the author’s own memories of a darshan[1] of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi while he was passing through Patna, sometime in early 1931. This is how he records his ‘encounter’ with the Saint of Sabarmati who worked magic on the masses with the mantra of Ahimsa, non-violence.

“By 1930 all of India and its British rulers too were uttering one name with awe: Gandhi. One evening it came to my ears that the Mahatma would reach Patna at 7 am the next morning, spend the day in the city and leave by the Punjab Mail at night. 

“I did not sleep well that night. I was up at the crack of dawn and left home at 5 am on the pretext of getting a book from a friend. But I could not get anywhere near the Patna railway station, which was teeming with people who had arrived before sunrise. It was no different along the path he would be driven down. I hung around at one end of the platform, eyes glued to the exit gate. 

“Policemen on horseback trotted past me. A police van was parked close by. Those patrolling the platform carried bayonets and batons. Because of my green years and my small built, I was allowed to inch ahead. From time to time the sky was rent with the cry of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai! Long live the Mahatma!’

“All of a sudden, perhaps to steel myself, I started to whisper: ‘Vande Mataram!  I salute you, my Motherland!’ As if on a cue, the man next to me cried out aloud: ‘Vande Mataram!’ The crowd roared in an echo: ‘Vande Mataram! Vande Mataram!!’

“Suddenly a train rolled in with a long whistle. And people all around me broke into the cries of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ ‘Bharat Mata ki jai!’ ‘Vande Mataram!’ I found myself matching their voice…

“Soon people started saying, ‘There he goes…’ Some cars came forward with Gandhi-topi clad volunteers. And then, there was the face so familiar from the newspapers, peering out of a hood-open Ford. Mahatma Gandhi, clad in a knee-length khadi dhoti, a chadar draped over his bare torso, a volunteer on either side, was greeting everyone with folded hands. What an inspiring image!

“I also broke into the cry of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’‘ The crowd had started running behind the moving car. I joined them, without a pause in the slogan. A few paces later, I bumped into someone and fell down by the wayside. As an elderly gentleman lifted me up and soothingly dusted me off. I felt a resolve surface in my thoughts: ‘Freedom must be won!'”

 *

Nabendu Ghosh may or may not have had another prototype for the protagonist Ratan in Gandhiji. But it is said there actually lived close to College Street — where Nabendu lived at the time — a person named Gopal Mukherjee who owned a meat shop. He was a devotee of Subhash Chandra Bose and a critique of Gandhi. Reportedly this ‘paatha‘ — butcher — was funded by some Marwari businessmen and he led his team to retaliate from the fourth day of riots. After Independence, when he was urged to surrender his guns, knives and sword to Gandhiji, he apparently refused, saying, “I would willingly lay down my arms for Netaji, but not for Gandhiji. Why didn’t he stop the killings in Noakhali?”

The author may have woven in some traits of Gopal Paatha but, like a mirror image that is identical yet opposite, his protagonist Ratan is transformed by the iconic personality so that he surrenders his weapons — expressed symbol of violence — at the feet of the Mahatma.

*

As I watched Kamal Hasan’s Hey! Ram (2000), I was reminded of this story, ‘Gandhiji’ that was published in the collection Raater Gaadi (The Night Train) in 1964. Perhaps unknowingly the character played in the film by Om Puri reflects the protagonist Ratan. 

In Hey! Ram, A rioteer who has snuffed out scores of lives walks up to the fasting Gandhi in Beliaghata, throws a roti towards him and says, “I have bloodied my hands with many lives but I will not have your death on my conscience.” He resonates Ratan, the butcher who finds his biggest high in draining out human blood but once he rests his eyes on the frail sage, something happens deep inside him. He who wondered why his taking a life should matter to ‘Gendo’, stakes his own life to protect a Muslim.

*

Nabendu Ghosh experienced the magic of the Mahatma at age fourteen, long years before he became my father. 

I felt the magic of the man whom Rabindranath Tagore gave the name of Mahatma when I was well into my forties, and was doing a Fellowship in Oxford, on a Charles Wallace award, on John Ruskin and his Influence on Gandhi and Tagore. 

Then, almost 20 years later, we were at the critical juncture in time when we were completing 70 years of Gandhi’s passing and approaching his Sesquicentennial Birth Anniversary. That is when I started wondering: “What does Mohandas Karamchand mean to those acquiring voting rights in India now? Is he only the face on every Indian currency note? Is he only ‘M G Road’ — the high street of every city in India? Is he a boring memory who forces every one of his countrymen to shun drinking on his birthday?” 

Or, is there any valid reason to recall what he said — in Natal and Transvaal and Pietermaritzburg; in Kolkata and Noakhali, Chowri Chowra and Dandi, Bombay and Delhi? Is there anything in his actions that can change the lives of not only Indians but everywhere in the world where people are tired of terror strikes and gunshots and discrimination in the name of caste or creed or colour?

For, influence he certainly did, the lives of so many personalities… Not for nothing was Mohandas of Porbandar to become Gandhiji, Mahatma, Bapu, Father of the Nation

[1] To go to view a great or holy man

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Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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