Amit Chaudhuri Quotes & Sayings

I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning. — Amit Chaudhuri

Anyway, if Calcutta today suffers in comparison, it's not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today. — Amit Chaudhuri

History is not the annals; it's what happens around us when we're unaware it's history. — Amit Chaudhuri

When afternoon came to Vidyasagar Road, wet clothes ... hung from a clothesline which stretched from one side to another on the veranda of the first floor. The line, which had not been tightly drawn anyway, sagged with the pressure of the heavy wet clothes that dripped, from sleeves and trouser-ends, a curious grey water on to the floor, and, especially in the middle, one noticed the line curved downwards, as if a smile were forming. — Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply. — Amit Chaudhuri

the world's cheapest small car, Tata's Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal's quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development. — Amit Chaudhuri

Fantasists aren't natural readers. They grow restive easily. — Amit Chaudhuri

On the big bed, Mamima and Sandeep's mother began to dream, sprawled in vivid crab-like postures. His aunt lay on her stomach, her arms bent as if she were swimming to the edge of a lake; his mother lay on her back, her feet (one of which had a scar on it) arranged in the joyous pose of a dancer. — Amit Chaudhuri

Her hair is troublesome and curly ... It falls in long, black strands, but each strand has a gentle, complicated undulation travelling through it, like a mild electric shock or a thrill, hat gives it a life of its own; it is visually analogous to a tremolo on a musical note. — Amit Chaudhuri

The gutters in the lane overflowed with an odd, languid grace. Water filled the lane; rose from ankle-deep to knee-deep. Insects swam in circles. Urchins splashed about haphazardly, while Saraswati returned from market with a shopping-bag in her hands; insects swam away to avoid this clumsy giant. Her wet footprints printing the floor of the house were as rich with possibility as the first footprint Crusoe found on his island. — Amit Chaudhuri

The Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century. — Amit Chaudhuri

He has a traditional shopper's DNA, an eye for freshness and appearance, and a consistent sense of a home to go back to. — Amit Chaudhuri

Photographers are the new Brahmins: we have no volition when they rule us. — Amit Chaudhuri

Only drunks stare at statues .... I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life. — Amit Chaudhuri

The city was still .... Soon the machinery would start working again, not out of any sense of purpose, but like a watch that is wound daily by someone's hand. Almost without any choice in the matter, people would embark upon the minute frustrations and satisfactions of their daily lives. It was in this moment of postponement that the azaan was heard, neither announcing the day nor keeping it a secret. — Amit Chaudhuri

[G]ive nothing centrality, because writing is about continually shifting weight from one thing and moment to the other. — Amit Chaudhuri

The armchairs, with their flat, sedentary cushions, were designed for society, but the bed was made for solitude. It had a straitened and measured narrowness, an austere frame made to contain the curves of a single body, to circumscribe it, carry it, give it a place, and when I slept at night, I possessed it entirely. — Amit Chaudhuri

The grown-ups snapped the chillies (each made a sound terse as a satirical retort), and scattered the tiny, deadly seeds in their food. — Amit Chaudhuri

Frame after aluminium frame had replaced the casements. The gesture by which you push a window open was now unnecessary. ... It was as if a part of us that was air and breeze had been denied entry. — Amit Chaudhuri

Years ago, my mother and I fell in love with Busybee's voice, its calm, even tone, and a smile which was always audible in the language. My father, meanwhile, is clipping his nails fastidiously, letting them fall on to an old, spread-out copy of the Times of India, till he sneezes explosively, as he customarily does, sending the crescent-shaped nail-clippings flying into the universe. — Amit Chaudhuri

... "shagging" - a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these. — Amit Chaudhuri

the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime — Amit Chaudhuri

This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place. — Amit Chaudhuri

While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings. — Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason. — Amit Chaudhuri

Water begins to boil in the kettle; it starts as a private, secluded sound, pure as rain, and grows to a steady, solipsistic bubbling. — Amit Chaudhuri

The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world. — Amit Chaudhuri

The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali's appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny. — Amit Chaudhuri

This is what's beautiful about staying in a club or hotel: you're invisible, as is your neighbour. — Amit Chaudhuri

History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book. — Amit Chaudhuri

At the base of her ankle is a deep, ugly scar she got when a car ran over her foot when she was six years old. That was in a small town in Bangladesh. Thus, even today, she hesitates superstitiously before crossing the road, and is painfully shy of walking distances. Her fears make her laughable. The scar is printed on her skin like a radiant star. — Amit Chaudhuri

Internationalism' is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership. — Amit Chaudhuri

At the conclusion of Hollywood disaster movies and epics, time moves backward, piecing together like a jigsaw the elements that had come apart. The Titanic resumes its journey; Russell Crowe is reunited with his murdered wife and son. It's not a happy ending; it's a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary. — Amit Chaudhuri

I ... take a selfie with him; two, to be safe. My lips are parted, as if I'm poking a dead thing to see if it'll come to life; it's the phone I'm attempting to keep at a distance. He's smiling faintly, as if amuse by some exotic piece of wildlife. — Amit Chaudhuri

[T]here's a thin line separating the delicate from the bloodless, in art as in food. — Amit Chaudhuri

A customs man at JFK had asked them to open the suitcases (in case they were smuggling in Indian fruits or sweets, perhaps). 'Ulysses!' the large bespectacled disbelieving customs man had said. 'Are you a student?' Ananda had nodded, though he was in the equivalent of high school. 'I wouldn't read Ulysses unless I was a student!' said the customs man, shutting the suitcase after his glimpse into the tantalising freemasonry of studenthood. A potentially incendiary book then - on the verge of being, but not quite, contraband. And near-unreadable. Ananda — Amit Chaudhuri

All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference. — Amit Chaudhuri