Upamanyu Chatterjee, master of the absurd

A new collection brings together four sharp novellas by the writer, each crackling with his acerbic take on the human condition

- Aditya Mani Jha

In the titular novella from Upamanyu Chatterjee's The Hush of the Uncaring Sea: Novellas 2018-2025, a racist sea captain from Apartheid-era South Africa is talking himself into abandoning an accidental stowaway aboard his ship—a naive Bengali young man named Abani who boarded in Calcutta (now Kolkata) to see a relative off and took a nap at the wrong time. The passage is vintage Chatterjee, not just because of the black humour but also because of the way he presents evil as a tragically banal phenomenon; the idea that given the right circumstances, any of us could nonchalantly carry out the worst atrocities. Like leaving a helpless young man in the middle of the ocean on a threadbare raft with meagre supplies.

"Kon-Tiki covered seven thousand kilometres of the Pacific in three months on just some logs of balsa. In contrast, our guest would only have to commune with the dolphins for an hour or two before someone picks him up. The Indian Navy, a sister merchant vessel, a deep-sea fishing trawler, a smuggler's ferry being chased by some coastal patrol—somebody is sure to notice our lad on the raft, swoop down on him and take him in."

Among the four novellas collected here, The Hush of the Uncaring Sea is the one that represents a departure in style for Chatterjee, and it is unyieldingly strange in the best of ways. After all, being at sea for extended stretches of time exposes the body and the soul to scenarios and challenges that end up reshaping them forever.

At once a comedy-of-errors, a survival story and a twisted parable, Abani's journey is presented as neither wholly spiritual nor entirely secular but as the saying goes on X (formerly Twitter), "a secret third thing". On more than one occasion I was reminded of the works of William Golding, especially his novel