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Formats
Hardcover Book Details
  • 03/2015
  • 9789351160182 9351160181
  • 260 pages
  • $24.29
Paperback Details
  • 06/2015
  • 9351772152
  • 264 pages
  • $16.99
Ebook Details
  • 11/2013
  • B00GZK374U
  • 260 pages
  • $7.83
This Place
Jeevan Sharma, an Indian immigrant in the US and a former taxi driver, manages his Pakistani landlord Shabbir Ahmad's accounts in return for rent-free accommodation. The quiet rhythm of his days in Baltimore is punctuated only by interactions with his neighbors on 26th Street: Miss Lucy, an old black lady who makes him pancakes; a World War II veteran, Henry, and his dog Oscar; and Matthew and Kay, a married couple in their late twenties, who are negotiating a difficult relationship. Then two things happen to throw his life into disarray: the sudden arrival of Sunita, a young woman who has walked away from a cheating husband, and the decision by the City of Baltimore to demolish the block that they live in. Will Jeevan be able to protect his old and infirm friends from the power of the City and Shabbir's greed? Can his settled solitude withstand the possibility of happiness with someone else? This Place is a novel about a group of people for whom neighborhood means more than simply living next to each other. It is a book about accepting and fighting against impermanence. It is also a book about South Asians in America at the end of the twentieth century.
Reviews
Businessline

If there is one unerring skill that Amitabha Bagchi possesses, it is the one he uses to home in on characters whose actions are immoral by social standards but peculiarly ethical from their own standpoint. His second published novel, The Householder, was a splendid unravelling of this theme. In its successor in bookshops, This Place(it is actually the second novel Bagchi wrote), this is what drives Shabbir Ahmad, the Pakistani immigrant in Baltimore, who insists on making a living by repeatedly straying across the line of moral acceptability. And yet, when looked at as a means for a representative of the Third World to play the system in the US and come out a winner, there’s something grudgingly justifiable about his tactics.

Bagchi’s forte is to make the reader understand — if not actually cheer for — such people. This Place is set in Baltimore, which becomes a suburban confluence of itinerant individuals in search of that something which will make their lives more meaningful than living the American dream of having two cars in the garage. Tellingly, none of the characters in the novel besides Shabbir seems to possess a car.

There is Jeevan Sharma from Delhi, who has drifted into the city after giving up a career as a taxi-driver elsewhere, trading in his mathematical skills for a life of helping people with their taxes and accounts. There is Sunita, whose husband, thrust upon her by her mother in Meerut, sleeps with other women and beats her. There are Kay and Mathew, neither happy with their work, thwarted from their true calling in life and pursuing dreams that they know can never be realised. And there is Miss Lucy, the embodiment of the older world order that the drifters are both dismantling and protecting.

The actual drama in their lives comes to a flashpoint around the possibility of Miss Lucy being evicted from the home in which she has lived, loved and lost. But this is just a setting for the people to play out their uncertainties, inner journeys and moral conflicts through a marvellous unspooling of dialogue and dilemmas. Bagchi’s ear for conversation is so good that it almost compensates for some of the clichés in his characters: for instance, Kamran, the second-generation Pakistani, is inevitably caught in a cultural no-man’s land, while the handicapped Henry has the proverbial heart of gold.

The precision of the structure of this novel belies the chaos that passes for real life. The characters, too, are etched not in all their complexity, but as figures representing specific qualities. And at least one of the tracks, featuring Jeevan and Sunita, is simplistically romantic to the point of maudlin in places. There is no high passion or dramatic collision of wills or perspectives here, but there is a tenderness between people that makes the world seem human again. Although This Place is set in 1997, when the Wall Street-funded American excessive living was peaking, it captures ways of life that are neither ostentatious nor fuelled by greed.

Bringing together as it does Indian and Pakistani immigrants and middle-class Americans, this novel might appear to be treading on Jhumpa Lahiri territory. But it seems more reminiscent of Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, in which, too, sex becomes a metaphor for individuals trying — and mostly failing — to impose their control over the anarchic progression of events in their lives. Perhaps it is more than a linguistic symbol that the one character who seems to do least in the entire novel, only responding to the true north of his moral compass in each of his encounters, is Jeevan, whose name, obviously, means life.

Bagchi’s people are neither heroes nor villains, though their choices can make them appear that way. But his ability to stand scrupulously clear of judgement makes his book both uncomfortable and warm. The first, because, denied the opportunity of approving or censuring, the reader can see the uneasy contours of herself or himself in the one or two heightened qualities of the characters here. And the second because, almost as though this is an urban parable, there is peace and acceptance in the story, even if no one actually gets what he or she has been seeking, even if some of the lives seem bound for tragedy and the others, for nondescript contentment.

This is a book about personal failure, and the attempt to rise above it through kindness and integrity. This is a book about the roots that even a person perpetually on the move can set down in a seemingly alien land. This is a book about the kind of experience that lies at the core of our lives, but all too well camouflaged by the sensory overload that our daily existence has turned into. This Place is not the perfect novel, but reading it is a reaffirmation of faith in the story as the best way to tell truths about human lives.

Reviewer: Arunava Sinha.

Indian Express

The novelist has the blessing of the inexhaustible subject: you and me,” wrote Eudora Welty in an 1956 essay. And added: “You and me, here.” The title of Amitabha Bagchi’s new novel, This Place, gestures to that third element of geography. As Welty says, “fiction is properly at work on the here and now, or the past made here and now; for in novels we have to be there.” To reach “there”, the novelist evokes not just its streets and sidewalks, the sounds of its neighbourhoods and the texture of its dereliction, but allows his characters to strike their roots in its soil. It becomes the place on which they stand and view the world.

In Baltimore, Wire-country, a block of residences is about to be torn down, to be redeveloped into a spiffier address. It’s not a place with great history, or one which inspires great affection. Shabbir Ahmad, a hardworking restaurant owner from Pakistan, has been waiting for exactly such a plan of gentrification to multiply the worth of the houses he has been sitting on. For the American couple, Matthew and Kay, who have moved from Providence, it’s another stop where they hope to sort out the tangles of their marriage and thwarted ambitions. But, Jeevan Sharma, a maths postgraduate from Delhi who ended up as a rootless taxi driver in America, and never called home again, “had felt something like contentment here in Baltimore. He felt like he could stay in this place for a long time”. His friendships are tentative and unwordy. He talks baseball with Henry, a former war veteran. He sits on the steps of his house to hear his aged black neighbour, Miss Lucy, play the organ, the music like a caress on the broken neighbourhood. “It felt like it was pouring down from the brilliant blue sky. It seemed to be entering everything: the asphalt with its cracks, the empty parking lot across the street, the deserted factory building next to the alley and the traffic passing by on Howard Street beyond.” The manicured future of her neighbourhood does not appeal to Miss Lucy, nor does the offer of a better, bigger house. “It is not the house I birthed my child,” she retorts. A plan to halt the march of development is hatched by Matthew and Kay, with an unlikely ally in Shabbir’s son, a journalist.

In a world in ceaseless motion, where the migrant is celebrated, the tug of belonging, as exemplified by Miss Lucy, seems anachronistic. While the novel does set up the ideas of displacement and progress against each other, it does so quietly — without interfering in the flow of the plot — and without being reductive. As Jeevan’s trajectory in the book shows, belonging is also a pang that arises out of displacement. It visits one, uninvited, like an epiphany.

This is Bagchi’s third novel, and it is no exaggeration to describe him as a prominent member of the League of Underrated Writers. His first, Above Average, got tagged as a “campus novel”, with all its unfortunate associations, and obscured what it was trying to be: again, an exploration of place (east Delhi’s middle-class neighbourhoods) and ideas of masculinity. In This Place, Jeevan is a man remarkably shorn of macho-ness, who spurns the responsibility of tending to his parents, the adrenalin rush of earning wads of money, and who refuses to hit the man who torments the woman he loves — despite grave provocation. In this most laconic of novels, his inner conflict is hinted at, not explicated.

This is a novel tautly concentrated on plot and the unravelling of character, with no quarter given to linguistic hi-jinks. There are only a few false notes — the awkward sex scenes come to mind. At the end of the chapters, though, Bagchi seems to have allowed himself some liberty. In each coda, the authorial eye sweeps with tenderness over Baltimore in these lyrical passages of descriptions. “Sneakers hang from the phone lines, their laces tied together, irretrievable. In the quiet afternoon, their shadows move slowly across the empty street. A light breeze makes them swing like pendulums. The time they mark passes gently, unobserved.” This place, this “gathering spot” of feelings and experiences, is, like the life of the characters who inhabit it, touched by a tenuous beauty.

Reviewer: Amrita Dutta

Formats
Hardcover Book Details
  • 03/2015
  • 9789351160182 9351160181
  • 260 pages
  • $24.29
Paperback Details
  • 06/2015
  • 9351772152
  • 264 pages
  • $16.99
Ebook Details
  • 11/2013
  • B00GZK374U
  • 260 pages
  • $7.83
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