Amit Chaudhuri

In Friend of My Youth, a novelist named Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008 terrorist attacks, weighs heavily on his mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amit's last remaining connection to the city he once called home. Amit Chaudhuri's new novel is about geographical, historical and personal change. It asks a question we all grapple with in our lives: what does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? It is a striking reminder that, as the Guardian has said, 'Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel.'

Friend of My Youth

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Remembering this, I hold in balance the same emotions I did from fifteen years ago: pleasure, that a man as striking and humane as my father should have been paid tribute to; pleasure, that even in a city as forgetful as this one, people can store away a memory of dignity; pleasure, that he should be acknowledged even when he'd gone from here and, on retirement, forfeited everything, as he'd forfeited his past upon Partition; guilt, that we'd always lived off the fat of the land. To those who have, more shall be given. If you have nothing, even the little you have is taken from you. This is unarguable. But the guilt is a spectre; it has no basis in reality. I wish it to be gone.

Friend of My Youth quotes

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