'Trembling...Can Be Heard'

A young man of 16, visiting his cousins in Calcutta in a house in a "middle-middle-class area," has just published his first poem. This not-yet-poet from Bombay is the narrator of Amit Chaudhuri's short story "Portrait of an Artist." The artist in the story is not the visiting youth, however, but an older man, the English tutor who comes each week to instruct the cousins. This man is respectfully called mastermoshai.

Mastermoshai has already been shown the narrator's poem. (One of the cousins reports that the teacher was "very impressed.") On a Saturday morning, the budding poet meets mastermoshai. He has a "very Bengali face" with "spectacles that belonged to his face as much as his eyes did" and "teeth that jutted out from under his lip, making his face belong to the preorthodontal days." The cousins, and also the narrator, wait for mastermoshai to say something about the poem. When two literary men meet in Bengal, they do not indulge in small talk but instead "straightaway enter realms of the abstract and articulate," we are advised. Fittingly, mastermoshai's first question to the poet, in a Bengali-inflected English, is, "Are you profoundly influenced by Eliot?"

"It was mastermoshai who first spoke to me of Baudelaire," the narrator says, and there are other discoveries in this induction into the literary life. When the older man takes the poet to an editor's house in another part of Calcutta, Chaudhuri's portrait of the artist shades into a portrait of private homes and of the city as a whole. In Calcutta, our poet discovers, clerks and accountants nurture an intellectual or literary life, not only in English but also Bengali. The city appears provincial, but it also reveals, like Joyce's Dublin, its particularity.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.