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Photo: Sandeep Saxena

Life in a city Saikat Majumdar

So Silverfish, Majumdar’s debut novel, recently published by Harper Collins India, seemingly came to being for two reasons. First, because this assistant professor of English Literature in America’s prestigious Stanford University had to respond to the “usual norm” at the institution to “go low on teaching and publish more.” As he jocularly puts it, “So I could write in my pyjamas.”

And the other explanation is, Majumdar, having grown up in Kolkata, has always lived with certain representative images of the city caught in a miscellany of history and modernity, typicality and nonconformity, and human expectations. Spiced up by his observations drawn from childhood memories and grandmother tales.

The author feels there is a gap to be filled as far as depiction of present-day life in Kolkata is concerned as not much has been written in English novels about it “except The Midnight Children kind of experience.”

“I wanted to document a common man’s experience. I wanted to connect to that faceless person who usually doesn’t get to tell his story,” elaborates this Jadavpur University alumnus.

Like many non-resident Indians, Majumdar too had been making his annual trips to his home city, and “observing life there”. Though he thought he had succeeded in importing on to his pages glimpses of contemporary Kolkata, interspersed with slivers of feudal Kolkata, “many people who have read my book but say this is the Kolkata of the ’90s.” But then, if you know that maze of a city, you would not blame Majumdar for seeing what he wanted to see.

And as expected, the author has banked upon graphic sentences to frill his characters and their milieu, with trips to “Writers’ Building, Gariahat and all”. On most pages, Silverfish smells of a typicality usually seen in a Satyajit Ray movie or in a Bankim Chandra plot. Majumdar doesn’t deny being influenced by the works of such luminaries simply because they were so archetypal. He also agrees that his book has “turned out to be quite cinematic.”

But perhaps what is singular about Silverfish is its overt way of asserting the fact that our novels in English are no more written keeping Western readers in mind. They are increasingly being written for Indian readers. So in Majumdar’s tome, you won’t find an explanation for a turn of a vernacular phrase like “kalboishaki storms”, etc.

Smiles the author, even as he adds, “That’s true.” Though that is not a deliberate move, he stresses.

And now, with Silverfish out of the way, next on Majumdar’s plan is his second novel, which he has already started penning. “It will be a global novel and more autobiographical than this one,” he says.

Like he started his westward journey, the plot will start in Kolkata, travel to Canada, and to the U.S.

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