Books I Hate. Books I Love.

Finally finished reading "A House for Mr. Biswas"; all 623 pages of it. Few novels have tortured me as much as this one. Don't get me wrong. I whooshed through the first 400 pages of it. But going ahead after that seemed so pointless. The same people entering, leaving, entering, leaving again and again and again. Mr. Biswas going from non-house to non-house to non-house to yet another non-house and finally finding a house he can call his own, but dying soon after. Such is life. Pointless. Personally, I don't think life is pointless, but the latter part of the book seemed a lot like that. Maybe I'm just stupid and don't get critically acclaimed books. I like a good story that makes me smile, laugh, cry, and this voluminous work by Nobel-prize-winning Naipaul makes me do nothing of the sort... or to be fair, not enough of the sort considering its size.

However, I recently read a wonderful book which I couldn't finish fast enough, and once I completed it, all I wanted to do was go back to the beginning and start all over again. Every page was a joy. Every character was real despite the eccentricities, the foibles, the drama, and the non-drama, or maybe because of it all. The novel was "Chowringhee" by Shankar, translated from the Bengali version by Arunava Sinha. The novel follows the life of a male hotel receptionist from the day he enters the gates of the Shahjahan Hotel on Chowringhee till the night that the hotel management finds no more use for him.

It is the story of the hotel and the people who are affected by it. Careers are begun; business deals made and unmade; hearts join only to be broken; conspiracies, lies, jealousies emerge from behind the color-co-ordinated curtains and take their place beside friendship, family, love, and respect. Tragedies are but a part of life within the Shahjahan, but people go on believing and hoping. Moments of doubt burst on to the stage periodically, but disappear with the last strains of the cabaret.

Set in the Calcutta of the 1950s, the people, the incidents, the ideas could make themselves at home in the Kolkata of the 2000s. People come and people go but the Shahjahan lives on to welcome future generations of hotel goers who come as guests or visitors but leave behind invisible imprints that can never be washed away by the laundry department. And even after you've turned the last page, you find yourself wishing there were a few pages more. You too have long ceased being a visitor and have become part of the Shahjahan.