ANOTHER STRANGE AND SUBLIME ADDRESS

In Sojourn, Amit Chaudhuri's latest novel, an Indian academic arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. With time, he merges with the city, loses his sense of self, flits between the past and present, creating a haunting reading experience. The author speaks to Reader's Digest about his book, history, music and his attitude towards the teaching of creative writing.

- Sukhada Tatke

Do cities like Berlin, where history weighs heavily, lead to disorientation, as felt by Sojourn's protagonist?

The state of absorption is what is of primary value and importance to me. What I was playing with was the idea that the narrator goes to Berlin and becomes absorbed in a lot of what he's seeing. The absorption causes a kind of wavering in the distinctions he would ordinarily-among them, between being an Indian and being a European. So, absorption becomes a form of surrender. [In] those unlikely moments, where he is recognizing places, as if he belonged there... he begins to become so much part of [Berlin's] history, which he has forgotten, that he begins to lose himself. He begins to lose that sense of who he is.

But how important was the city of Berlin to the story of Sojourn?

I've written about cities all my life. I am now investigating [in this novel] a paradoxical history, which is not sufficiently defined by the historical definitions we are conscious of, and by which we define ourselves. Those have to be put aside in such an encounter. So, it's not a question about thinking about Berlin first or my character first: I'm looking at a moment of historical change that's long been present for me. I began to write A Strange and Sublime Address in 1986, and by then I would have sensed that a particular world, the world of modernity, was already passing. By the time the book was published in 1991, we had emerged into this new world, the Berlin Wall had just fallen and economic deregulation had taken place. So, this is a kind of moment in which to recollect what happened to us, to me, through this story about the city.

You write that "when freedom is the only reality, you are no longer free". So, when are you really free?