U-Special

As in? , Chowdhury has worked out a style and tone that is recognisably his own. He does not need the crutches of reference, unless it is to state that his novels belong to a tradition of storytelling that owes more to R.K. Narayan than to Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie or Amitav Ghosh. They are constructed on a small canvas, move at a leisurely, slightly idiosyncratic pace, and are told with restrained humour and compassion.

Day Scholar is narrated by the protagonist, Hriday Thakur, a Bengali from Bihar, who arrives in the North Campus of Delhi University (DU), and through a series of criminal, political and romantic engagements, learns something about himself as a person and a writer. Chowdhury, writing after postmodernism—as are most of us, though critics do not always seem to notice—manages a narrative that is reflexive without being derivative. Unlike Hriday and his friends, I stayed on in Bihar, but their stories seem fascinatingly familiar, and hugely enjoyable. It is a novel I would recommend to all university students, at least of my generation; it ought to become cult at DU. If only Picador had done a less shoddy job on the production.