I now realize that leaving home was a gesture like goodbye notes from failed suicides. Amit Ray leaves his upper-class home in India with nine books in his bag and seventy rupees in his pocket beginning his journey intoLife'. His story runs a hectic course from Calcutta to New Delhi and after a poignant and disastrous Italian interlude on to London whores scatological misadventures Paris Kí¸benhavn and back to London. In-between he works variously as a shoeshine boy cub reporter lavatory attendant engineer and writer. The twentieth-century Odysseus Amit is obsessed with that contraband comestible-Woman. Adam-and-Eve confrontations lead the hero into situations which are in turn lurid erotic pathetic tender and sometimes outrageously hilarious. Like a beaver Amit noses his way into that elusive enclave theHampstead intellectual circuit' and learns of the tribal customs unspoken dogmas and ambiguous hostilities of fellow humans who would feign to know all the answers. And like the proverbial cork he bobs up and down but never sinks. At the end of the story we find him packing his bags to revisit the land of his birth. There is a hint of thirst quenched. But if we have come to know the hero at all we must assume that it is only a calm before another storm. About the Author Born in 1939 Sasthi Brata grew up and was educated in Calcutta reading physics at Presidency College. He left India'soon after and has lived in London and various other capital cities in Europe and America.Vinay Govind Brahmania has a creative workshop in Mumbai which caters to the advertising and animatio... See more
I now realize that leaving home was a gesture like goodbye notes from failed suicides. Amit Ray leaves his upper-class home in India with nine books in his bag and seventy rupees in his pocket beginning his journey intoLife'. His story runs a hectic course from Calcutta to New Delhi and after a poignant and disastrous Italian interlude on to London whores scatological misadventures Paris Kí¸benhavn and back to London. In-between he works variously as a shoeshine boy cub reporter lavatory attendant engineer and writer. The twentieth-century Odysseus Amit is obsessed with that contraband comestible-Woman. Adam-and-Eve confrontations lead the hero into situations which are in turn lurid erotic pathetic tender and sometimes outrageously hilarious. Like a beaver Amit noses his way into that elusive enclave theHampstead intellectual circuit' and learns of the tribal customs unspoken dogmas and ambiguous hostilities of fellow humans who would feign to know all the answers. And like the proverbial cork he bobs up and down but never sinks. At the end of the story we find him packing his bags to revisit the land of his birth. There is a hint of thirst quenched. But if we have come to know the hero at all we must assume that it is only a calm before another storm. About the Author Born in 1939 Sasthi Brata grew up and was educated in Calcutta reading physics at Presidency College. He left India'soon after and has lived in London and various other capital cities in Europe and America.Vinay Govind Brahmania has a creative workshop in Mumbai which caters to the advertising and animation industry.