‘He did.’
There’s a loud voice coming from the first floor. I open the door to the stairs to take a look. A little group has congregated outside the Sea Lounge. Some of them I know by sight. A woman addresses them. ‘Please follow me.’ They vanish into an inner passage. I won’t see them again. It’s one of the hotel’s new twice-daily heritage walks. We only just found out about them.
At the conclusion of Hollywood disaster movies and epics, time moves backward, piecing together like a jigsaw the elements that had come apart. The Titanic resumes its journey; Russell Crowe is reunited with his murdered wife and son. It’s not a happy ending; it’s a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary.
In the Taj, time moves both backward and forward. I check out; someone else has arrived. Suitcases follow in the bell boy’s trolley. Nothing has changed. This is not an idyllic past that’s been constituted again. It’s the Taj as it is this afternoon; as it was on the afternoon of our arrival four days ago. We go to the lobby and wait for the Uber.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to – those who have believed in my work and in this book: Sarah Chalfant and Alba Ziegler-Bailey; Mitzi Angel; Rajni George; and Sigrid Rausing, for also carrying an excerpt in Granta.
A handful of friends I don’t need to name.
As ever, my wife Rinka and my daughter Radha, who, in different ways, make it possible for me to write.
About the Author
Amit Chaudhuri is the acclaimed author of six previous novels, including Odysseus Abroad and A Strange and Sublime Address, and two books of essays. He has been awarded the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the LA Times Book Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is a singer and composer.
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2017
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2017
All rights reserved
© Amit Chaudhuri, 2017
Cover design by Faber
Cover image © Bakul Matiyani / EyeEm
The right of Amit Chaudhuri to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–33761–3
Friend of My Youth Page 11