Freedom Song: Three Novels

Attended by its watchful, intuitive handmaiden--the laudable Chaudhuri, in his first U.S. publication--the English idiom emerges new-skinned and crying healthily in the humid air and shuttered rooms of Calcutta and Bombay. Collected in one volume, a primer on Chaudhuri's remarkable sui generis prose, these three modern, postcolonial novels poise their characters delicately between the ebb of the future and the flow of the past. This tension is often dramatized by the characters' use of the English tongue. A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) tells of the Bombay-bred Sandeep who aspires to be an English writer and, at 10 years old, already uses such words as ""tentative,"" ""gingerly"" and ""enthusiastic."" Morning piles on midday, which builds to evening (or ""cow dust"" as the Bengali word means literally) as Sandeep spends his school holiday with his poorer and less educated cousins in Calcutta. In their house, and in Chaudhuri's nostalgic gaze, routine is elevated to ritual. The uncle's shaving and the aunts' application of ""kumkum powder in the parting of their hair"" are sacred arts; the sound of bangles clinking, rattling keys and ""dervishing"" fans are hymnals in the domestic temple. The North Indian protagonist of Afternoon Raag (1993), like Chaudhuri himself once did, studies English literature at Oxford. Far from home, and deeply immersed in the transporting lines of Lawrence's poems, he remembers vividly scenes from his childhood and the traditional music he played with his now-dead guru. ""The raags,"" he says, ""woven together, are a history, a map, a calendar, of northern India..."" The simultaneous affairs the narrator carries on with two Indian girls--one skinny and one plump--provide a framework for his recollections and perfume the book with heady dormroom love. The final novel in the trio, Freedom Song, is a work of greater length and complexity than the preceding two; in it Chaudhuri hits the full stride of his mature voice. Dwelling longer on characterization, he examines the intricacies and contradictions of middle-class life in Calcutta through the relationships of one extended family. Bhaskar, a son more thin and dark than his mother wishes him, has compromised his chances of making a good match by joining the Communist Party and a street theater troupe. Bhaskar's Aunt Khuku and her friend Mimi winter out their late years in an intimate conspiracy of shawl-shrouded, tea-drinking gossip and political conversation. What may frustrate readers of the first two novels--that Chaudhuri seems to chronicle events as they occur to him, and pushes the stories to their ends by the thin connectives ""one time"" and ""the next day""--gives way here to a more deliberate plotting that is nonetheless charmingly concerned with the behavior of Calcuttan pigeons and the rain-damp laundry on the line. (Mar.) FYI: A Strange and Sublime Sadness won the 1991 Betty Trask Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Afternoon Raag won two prizes, in Britain.