Afternoon Raag, wrote Karl Miller, ‘interleaves experiences of Oxford – where the

narrator conducts a friendship with two Indian girls – and of Bombay, where a beloved
mother sips her weak tea, 'watching the lane, in which Christian men in shorts are walking
their Alsatians'. It is a meditation, a felicitous prose poem.’ Jonathan Coe, reviewing it for
the London Review of Books, wrote, ‘The triumphs of this novel are at once tiny and
enormous. Tiny because, like its predecessor A Strange and Sublime Address, it tells only
of a placid and uneventful life, a life of domesticity, routine and small daily rituals, in which
a ride on a bus or a rendezvous in a café is the closest we are likely to come to adventure;
enormous because Chaudhuri has once again turned this unspectacular material into
something enchanting, studded with moments of beauty more arresting than anything to
be found in a hundred busier and more excitable narratives.’

Freedom Song, his third, was published four years later. Set against the background of
the post-Babri Masjid demolition, it is a record of both the artificial quiet that such a socio-
political situation creates as well as the evocation of a Calcutta winter where everyday life
must go on. Published in America with the first two novels, it won the Los Angeles Times
Prize in 1999.

‘The condition of a stranger in a familiar land is dramatized with beguiling simplicity and
tact in this deeply moving fourth novel,’ Kirkus Reviews wrote about Chaudhuri’s fourth
novel, A New World. ‘Jayojit Chatterjee, exhausted and embittered after a year’s worth of
divorce proceedings against his unfaithful wife, takes a vacation as well from his teaching
job at a midwestern university, and returns with his seven-year-old son Vikram (“Bonny”—
because he “lies over the ocean”?) to Calcutta to visit his aging parents. Everything about
this sentimental journey and willed plunge into harmony and amity is destined to fail, or
fall short of expectations. Jayojit, an economist, can neither fathom Calcutta’s formless
commercialism nor contrive a sound investment strategy for his father “the Admiral”
(stricken by heart disease and diabetes and subsisting on a meager pension); his mother’s
frantic efforts at cooking nourish neither son nor grandson; and Jayojit (ironically
nicknamed “Joy”) supposedly works away at a book, yet a profound inertia settles over
him. Thinking of a second marriage, he nevertheless cannot stir himself to try to meet
women—and his custody of his beloved son is only temporary (two months a year). But
somehow, magically, Chaudhuri makes of this virtually plot-free story a compelling drama
of alienation and resignation. Every delicately chosen detail helps build an overwhelming
sense of people out of place (once-familiar streets now seem un-navigable mazes), out of
time (Bonny plays with plastic dinosaurs and pterodactyls), out of touch. So firmly does
Chaudhuri limit Jayojit’s horizons that at the close, as he flies back to America and
engages in conversation with a friendly young woman, their brief connection is
summarized thus: “[Jayojit] felt not the slightest attraction towards her, and was reassured
to sense that she probably felt none towards him.” A pitch-perfect analysis of repressed
and stunted emotion, and another triumph to set beside those of Desai, Rushdie, Roy, and
especially (the Chekhovian master Chaudhuri most closely resembles) R.K. Narayan.’