Flipping through the pages of Amitabha Bagchi’s new novel 'This Place', one can’t help but feel a sense of loneliness — a loneliness that Amitabha feels is an integral part of American life even in the highly populated cities including Baltimore, where his new novel is based. Earlier in the conversation, he happened to quote the famous Hindi writer Harishankar Parsai in some other context, that now seems apt to describe his portrayal of this loneliness — “If one can’t be true to one’s own time (and place), how can one be true to all times (and places)”.
“The way I have tried to write this book and to present different places in the story is, in a way, a tribute to American landscape painter Edward Hopper. Hopper understood the sense of loneliness in the vast continent that is America, and he painted it on his canvas. That depiction was on my mind when I wrote this book and I tried to approach Hopper’s work, conveying the same sense of loneliness, through my words,” shares Amitabha.
This Place is the story of Jeevan Sharma, an Indian immigrant living in the US, who has closed himself off emotionally. But then, circumstances force him to open up when a young woman, who has walked away from her husband, comes into his life; and also because of City of Baltimore’s decision to demolish the place that he lives in. Talking about the idea behind the story, Amitabha shares, “Baltimore is a place that I have lived in as a student, and have observed closely. One thing that really shocked me about it was how easily the buildings were demolished there and new ones built in their place in no time. In the ’90s, it wasn’t something I had seen in India, and it really had a big impact on me. So when I came back to India, I had it on my mind and wanted to write something that tells the story of what happens to people when the place they live in is demolished, and a new one is built in its place for somebody else to live in.”
“Another aspect of American life that troubled me was the fragility of marital relations. It might seem like a regular thing to talk about, but when it happens to people who are close to you, then you realise the toll it takes. So these different themes came together and pushed me to write the story,” adds Amitabha.
Though many writers write intuitively and just find the story as it flows along, Amitabha says he needs to know the overall structure of the story before he can start writing. He wonders if that has something to do with his background in engineering. “In fact, I knew the last scene of the story way back in 2005, even though I wrote it between 2008 and 2009. And after that, the big question is what story to tell and how to tell it to get to that ending so that it makes sense. In a way, the last scene becomes the summit you have to reach and when you reach it, it should be the logical conclusion to the journey,” he shares.
Interestingly, This Place was the second novel that he wrote before the critically acclaimed The Householder, but it was published as his third. “Actually, I was worried how Indian audience will react to it. When I wrote Above Average, I wrote it with only the Indian audience in mind. But this one was different. I felt it was too American with the baseball theme running throughout the book. But after the response to The Householder, I felt more confident about it. I knew the readers in India are ready,” concludes the bestselling author.
