Description
Picador India Past Continuous by Neel Mukherjee
The past is a cruel country; it never renounces its claim on you. Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds a chance to start his life all over again when he arrives in England to study. But to do that, he must not only relive his entire past but also try and understand it, naming things, making connections, unraveling the thread of a narrative he can only now bring himself to read. Above all, he must make sense of his relationship with his mother – scarred, abusive and all-consuming.But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for and as he loses himself in London and takes up residence with the old Anne Cameron he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of aliens. Meanwhile, the story that Ritwik writes to stave off his utter and complete loneliness – a Miss Gilby who teaches English, music and Western manners to Bimala, wife of educated zamindar, Nikhilesh – begins to find ghostly echoes in his life with Anne Cameron.Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the two stories across time, the stories of Miss Gilby in Raj India at a critical time in its domestic politics, and of Anne Cameron, whose South London garden starts being visited inexplicably by rare tropical birds, start converging. Which one is Ritwik making up?And then, one night, in the badlands of King’s Cross, Ritwik runs into Zafar bin Hashm, suave, impossibly rich, unfathomable, possible arms dealer. What does the drive to redemption hold for lost Ritwik?Set in 1970s and 80s India, 90s England and in the first decade of twentieth-century Bengal, on the eve of Lord Curzon’s infamous Bengal Partition of 1905, Past Continuous is a scalding book about dislocations and alienations, about outsiders and losers, about the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories and about the consolations of storytelling. It is also a book about the impossibilities of love.