Author: Inderjit Badhwar
Publisher: India Research Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 483
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8187943335
Description
A Lyrical recreation of a man and his times – spanning four generations. The action moves from a small town in northern India to Washington, New York and back in dizzying sequences. A welcome addition to the growing body of Indian contributions to English literature.
A Lyrical recreation of a man and his times – spanning four generations. The action moves from a small town in northern India to Washington, New York and back in dizzying sequences. The narrator, an Indian Baby-boomer, comes back from America to his ancestral home in the rural countryside to be by the side of his dying father. The old man knows this is his final sickness.
The room that contains his death bed- the “chamber of perfumes” – is where the family can imbibe, or sniff, the past, present, and the future. The nose performs a vital function of memory – the odors and fragrances of blood, kinship, childhood, death, sex the countryside and the wilderness.
The dying man is an atheist, an arch-conservative patriarch with surprisingly liberal values, a hugely humanitarian snob, and a poet at heart. He is a splendid shikari – hunter – who shares his skills with the family. He has love-hate relationship with the British, considers Hindu traditions stuffy and suffocating, and he teaches his children the freedom of the woods, the wild marshes, the scrub forests.
The denouement begins when the Shikari dies. The power of the cremation, gory but uplifting, lays open the very private last rites in a Hindu family. Suddenly, the confusion over whether their world belonged to Jesus, Hinduism or Woody Allen, begins to clear up. Inderjit Badhwar’s first novel is a stylistic breakthrough, an unapologetic and unabashed celebration of the hybrid Indian and an amazing revelation of the power of roots.
The book has been awarded France's prestigious literary prize as the best foreign debut novel of 2004, and was published under the title "La Chambre des Parfums" by Paris-based publisher Le Cherche-midi in March 2004.
REVIEWS:
An evocative cocktail of shikhar, sex and metaphysics. The main strength of this first novel by Inderjit Bandhwar is its originality, of both theme and style of writing. The character of the 'Papa' figure is convincing because it is drawn with wit, compassion and detachment. A welcome addition to the growing body of Indian contributions to English literature.
—Khushwant Singh