Or the Day Seizes You by Rajorshi Chankraborti; Delhi: Penguin India; 2006; Rs.250; pp.212.

I dread writing reviews. For the fear that I could be landing with a book that I will like but won't be able to rationalize why I liked it. Or worse, I might not like it and I hate writing baleful reviews. Sometimes I just wish there could be a simple funny book for me to review. Rajorshi Chakroborti's book Or the Day Seizes You was as unfunny as it gets!

Here is a Bengali writer, who steers clear off the Bengali staple: the silently suffering and stoically- calm middle class. This could have been a reason for celebration had not Chakroborti

ruined everything by creating a bedlam of a city where the grubby is substituted by the sinister, the humdrum gives way to paranoia and

the stifled middle class is re-invented as a dysfunctional set of groupies. Chakroborti is indubitably Bengali at heart, he gratefully dedicates his book to his parents, even though they) might have mentally squirmed reading parts of the novel. There are occa-

sional attempts to transmit the Bengali daily speech but these won't affect anyone. If one does not know the language they won't even notice it is there. What might cause a stumble, is if people can't keep a track of how Kaka and Kaku and Jethu are developing. They all come into the story in fits and starts via the protagonist Dasgupta or his father's narration. There is a character first called Uncle from America who is the quintessential legend-maker; all families have one of those--but this one is way too weird. He banquets with dictators who tell him of massacres, he goes on a mission to rescue the ousted President after a coup in Mogadishu: “Your uncle rode a cycle-rickshaw till he was beyond the city limits. The President crossed the border amid cylinders in the back of a gas delivery van.” He finds himself in La Paz or Peru, in Turkmenistan. On one mission they escape from elephants, on another “the van ran amok and piled into the carts through a mud wall. The backdoor was opened by a baker whose upper body was covered in a grid of bread meshed all over him like a coat of armour.” Interesting but you wonder where all of this is coming from!! Or what they contribute to Dasgupta's story. Perhaps Chakroborti's book was not entirely unfunny after all. Perhaps all that was wrong was that I didn't get the humour.

Even though most people are still looking for a story when they pick up fiction, giving a story just happens to be one of the 'features' an author

provides. The 'story' has long since stopped being of paramount importance. Dasgupta's devastation on learning by accident from his young daughter about his wife Meena's

adultery. though convincingly explored, is only a subsidiary interest in the novel. Chaos ensues in

Dasgupta's life and wears away the connection he has with his seven year old daughter Shormila. Dasgupta burrows himself away for years in a hotel in London owned by an acquaintance of his father. The best part of the book is the section when he returns

and pays a visit to his ex-wife and Shormila in Calcutta. They have been living their lives while he was wasting his. The tone of Dasgupta's grief and acceptance worked for me and one is given a welcome glimpse of what Chakroborti is capable of.

However, if you are looking for a 'story', the novel chokes on vicious sub-plots and patches of side-themes running wild. The cast is frankly scary; there are neighbours-from-hell (young Dasgupta defecates on his neighbour's doorstep, the neighbour after suffering years of other abuse retaliates by sending Dasgupta's uncle to jail). There is Pramathesh Mitra, a Bengali gangster-lord who wields incredible hold from Calcutta to Bombay. Dasgupta's father is himself a minor but not negligible mobster, the eldest son is a closet homosexual; one uncle gets clubbed with a wrench during a taxi ride, Dasgupta and his London friends get attacked and almost mauled by dogs during a trip to France and so on. Accidents and mishaps jostle for space in Or the Day Seizes You. The Dasgupta family receives a phone call from Uncle in Bombay and the whole family (except the hermit/allegedly gay man) flees to live incognito in Bombay. The gunning outside the American Embassy in Calcutta and the explosions inside the Parliament are thrown in to enhance the hype: “For a full hour we traded panicked conspiracy hypotheses about whether it could have been Pramathesh Mitra. He was showing us he would strike when we least

expected it, and he was insolently demonstrating his reach.” Within this apocalyptic frazzle there is a discussion on life and the form our novels should take. “The world will always be

as shamelessly full as ever--apathetic, incongruous, obscenely simultaneous--every element within it contaminating every other, and each moment as rapid and weightless as the last.” Dasgupta is just a hoax, the real hero is a scheme: “Infinite relentless simultaneity, infinitely promiscuous cross-contamination, and the only art worth anything is a story that can evoke it all, the total radioactive fullness of being...Everything must be evoked because anything less is just cowardice.”

There are you are. That explains the chaos that is Dasgupta's Life. Lest some of us are not convinced about the 'radioactive fullness of being', Or the Day Seizes You tells you pointblank that Proust too had “incorporated not just his own experiences from out of his broken and discontinuous memories, but the life and horrors of wartime France.” We are informed that Tolstoy did the same. Even Joyce. “He'd included everything that was humanly expressible in his first masterpiece.”

Or the Day Seizes You (bounces off Saul Bellow's famous title Seize the Day) produces a litany of “promiscuous” simultaneity, an eerie catalogue of “contamination.” Initially it can seem very affected but once initiated, it is possible to see that Chakroborti does have something to offer!

Nuzhat A. Mannan teaches English at Dhaka University.