THE BOOK
Eighty-five and half paralysed, Shyamanand is on his deathbed when he goes
missing. His apparent refusal to meet death in the expected way—calm and
accepting and lying down—is a cause for great anguish to his son Jamun, who
leads a life of quiet desperation, trying to balance feelings of despair and
resignation since the suicide of his friend and neighbour Dr Mukherjee. After
their father disappears, Jamun and his brother Burfi reconnect in their old home
that builder Lobhesh Monga has his eyes on. In their quest to find out what
happened to Shyamanand, they find a path out of desolation, even as TV executive
Kasturi, Jamun’s former lover and mother of his only child, is busy recycling
the more melodramatic moments of Jamun’s life for the blockbuster Hindi
soap Cheers Zindagi. In powerful, austere prose shot through with black humour,
Upamanyu
Chatterjee has produced an intensely moving examination of family ties and the
redemptive power of love, however imperfect, in the midst of death and
degeneration.
THE AUTHOR
Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in 1959. He joined the Indian Administrative
Service in 1983. His published works include short stories and the novels
English, August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries
of the Welfare State (2000), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in
English, and Weight Loss (2006). In 2008, he was awarded the Order of Officier
des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for his contribution to
literature.