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.

Genres: Fiction, India, LGBT, Queer, Historical Fiction, Indian Literature, Historical

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 18, 2008

About the author

Neel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta. His first novel, A Life Apart , won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction, among other honors, and his second novel, The Lives of Others , was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Prize. He lives in London.

Reviews

[Kunal Sen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The framing story here is Ritwik's and the story-in-the-story is that of Miss Gilby's; Miss Gilby herself is a minor character from Tagore's 'Ghare Baire' and Neel tells us her story, a new story (because it's her version of things, including events from the original hundred year old novel) in the old setting. The technique reminded me of Stoppard's resuscitation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Shakespeare's Hamlet. The framing story (Ritwik's) is more riveting but Miss Gilby's tale often foreshadows and parallels it and together, the two tales help the book come together powerfully.

I love this book for exactly the same reasons that Samir Dhond hates it for. I love a bit of the verbose and the operatic in prose (even the bleakness is often described with a flourish here). The language in the book is consistently spectacular, which is a little surprising in a meta-fiction work for such works tend to be more concept-heavy and less focused on aesthetics, as opposed to say, a less sweeping. This is sweeping, ambitious, but it's also an intimate, doll-house of a work. The prologue, or 'Chapter Zero' here, is one of the most audacious, emphatic, self-confident starts to any novel I've read in a really, really long time. It is a great hook while not trying to be a hook, and I couldn't put down the book after that. Ritwik's pain is so sustained that he walks through it in an objective daze and an ironic calm, not really belying any feelings, as though he feels too much, as though he is so brimmed with emotions, that any demonstration would be futile in itself.

'Past Continuous' is the best debut novel by an Indian author since Upamanyu Chatterjee's seminal 1988 classic, 'English, August' and is one of the must-read IWE works of the 21st century.

[Vestal McIntyre]

Sensual, beautiful, and gut-wrenchingly sad, this is the story of Ritwik, a boy who moves from the slums of Calcutta to Oxford on scholarship. In his attempts to stay in the country after graduation, he falls down a rabbit hole into a world of danger and exploitation: picking strawberries in the fields of Kent and hustling at King's Cross, all the while serving as a live-in nurse for a demented woman in her nineties, Anne Cameron. Ritwik’s relationship with Anne gives rise to some of the most tender and genuinely moving scenes I’ve read in recent years. Interspersed with Ritwik's story are sections of the novel he's writing about an English governess in India in at the turn of the century. This “book-within-a-book ,” fascinating in its own right, contrasts with and illuminates the main story. I read A LIFE APART a while ago, after it won India’s Vodafone Crossword Award, but I still get a chill when I think back on it.

[Book Riot Community]

Ritwik Ghosh is looking to start a new life when he travels from Calcutta to England to attend Oxford. But his schooling doesn't immediately guarantee him the good life, and dreams don't always come true, and he winds up living a shadowy existence performing odd jobs in the world of London's illegal immigrants to keep from going back to India. A remarkably sad but beautiful story, interspersed with a story Ritwik himself is writing.


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[Tanabrus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I presupposti per un bel libro c'erano tutti.
La storia di un ragazzo indiano che dalla povertà di Calcutta riesce ad arrivare in Inghilterra con una borsa di studio, solo per poi ritrovarsi senza prospettive alla fine dei due anni preferendo sparire nella clandestinità delle strade di Londra piuttosto che tornare nella sua terra d'origine.
Anche la storia di un ragazzo omosessuale, in un mondo e in un luogo che stanno imparando a convivere con questo, ma che sono ancora lontani da una vera accettazione.

E poi la storia di una donna inglese del secolo precedente, in India. La storia che il protagonista comincia a scrivere al college e cerca poco a poco di finire.


Tematiche interessanti, sopratutto il racconto della donna al tempo della rivolta contro i padroni inglesi, e il funzionamento del mondo sommerso della clandestinità.
Ma il risultato finale appare molto nebuloso.

A tratti la storia è lenta, impantanata. Poi scatta veloce, cambiando argomento, focalizzandosi su altro. Sfiora l'immigrazione clandestina, sfiora la prostituzione, sfiora la multiculturalità.
Sfiora tanti temi, ma poi passa oltre, di corsa, al tema successivo, senza mai addentrarsi realmente in uno tra questi.
Senza mai mostrarci realmente la personalità di Ritwik, cosa pensa, cosa prova.

La parte migliore del libro è la storia che Ritwik scrive, purtroppo.

[Asha Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neel, you're such a gem! Why didn't I read you earlier?
.
.
Freedom from a troublesome past and creating his own identity in a foreign land seems to be Ritwik's only goals in England. But there are far pressing matters he should attend to first - for instance - a means to earn, a roof over his head, and people he can rely on. On the other hand is his novel based on a Bengali zamindar in pre-partition India, he is struggling to finish.
Trying to put as much distance he can between himself and a childhood marred from parental abuse and general neglect of affection in the swampy by-lanes of Bengal, he is desperate to begin anew and his scholarship in England seems to be his only chance. But in truth, is it possible that what he is running from, is actually chasing him in the inevitable forms of 80 year-old dependent Anne Cameron and Zafar, his unfeeling elderly love interest?
.
.
I haven't come across a protagonist as complicated and compassionate as Ritwik, and there are personal reasons why I feel him in ways more than one.
.
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Recommended.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has received a lot of great critical acclaim but I found it hard to get into. It mixes two very different stories, one a historic fictional account of an English woman in India working as a tutor and companion to the wife of a wealthy local Indian man in the early 1900s, and the other a late 1900s tale of a young Indian man, orphaned and studying in Oxford on a scholarship. The historic story is apparently being written by the young Indian but the two - for me at least - just don't knit together at all well. Other than sharing the status of strangers in a strange land, there's very little that binds the two threads.

At times it feels like the author just couldn't decide which story to write and so forced together things that didn't belong between the same covers without making much of an attempt to link the two. Even within Ritwik's story (he's the young Indian) a lot of blind alleys were entered and lot of plot lines were suspended in mid air. I didn't get any sense of how Ritwik got a two year scholarship to Oxford - which in itself was a strange duration for an English Lit degree - and yet seemingly made no attempts to use that good fortune to get what might have been called a 'proper job' on its termination.

There are moments of great insight, including the point where Ritwik realises that his mother's behaviour towards him during his childhood was not 'normal' but he fails to move very far towards investigating or addressing the beatings and screaming his mother dished out. I also particularly liked the section of the book where he's living with the elderly lady, Anne, as her companion and helper.

I've read many historic books about English women in India - and most are more interesting than Miss Gilby's story. Similarly I've read much better books about the challenge of being young, gifted and gay (try The Boyfriend by R Raj Rao) and many better books about the immigrant experience (try The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota. What I don't really expect is to get all three mixed up into one book - moving clunkily between Indian ladies serving afternoon tea and playing the piano straight to cruising for blow jobs in the underground toilets of St Giles, Oxford.

Would I read him again? Yes, probably because nobody should be written off for a confused first novel, but I think this one would have benefited from a tougher editor to keep the book tighter, to tie up the lose ends and to maybe reduce the obsessive cruising descriptions.

[Alison Mercer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fans of Alan Hollinghurst and E M Forster’s A Passage to India will love this brilliant debut novel. It’s crisply and truthfully written, with an acute eye for the way people behave when they are trying to negotiate unfamiliar environments. Sometimes shocking, sometimes illuminating, laced with wit and shot through with violence and sadness, it moves elegantly between two intertwined narratives. Both are stories of migration, but in opposite directions.
So, in the present day, Ritwik travels from India to England after the death of his parents, and takes up a scholarship to study English literature at Oxford. The novel opens with a vivid and compelling description of his mother’s cremation: a real eye-opener. This is not the India of silks and spices, and yet, despite the sometimes squalid surroundings, there’s clarity and beauty in the language in which it is conveyed.
E M Forster wrote ‘Only connect’, and this is what Ritwik attempts to do, but it is only fleetingly possible. One evening he is picked up by a stranger; afterwards he returns to his college room and begins to write the story of Miss Gilby, an Englishwoman in India in the 1900s, who takes up the position of English tutor to a married Indian woman, but finds that even with the best will in the world, communication can go awry and slip into confusion.
Without a work permit, Ritwik struggles to survive in London. But he carries on with Miss Gilby’s story, as she witnesses the ferment of resistance following the partition of Bengal into Hindu and Muslim states.
Is it possible to remain in a place you have chosen, but which is frequently indifferent or, worse, openly hostile? In this novel, love and redemption always seem to be just out of reach. It’s a profound reflection not only on the experience of all those who seek to transplant themselves from one life to another, but also on how the past bubbles up in the present, even when you set out to leave it behind.

[Ming · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is beautifully written, even some of the many "difficult" scenes, contained poetic elements. The parallel but interwoven stories propel the book forward. Just as Miss Gilby is innocent but growing insightful, Ritwik becomes a sad and somewhat jaded character. Both have insights, and search for themselves in foreign lands. This is a book I'd re-read in order to digest its beauty and imaginative scope. And yet, part of me, wants to shut out the lingering bitter but understandable tone of the book.

[Gayle · Rating 2 out of 5]

The other reviews of this book on goodreads seem to be quite good but I have to admit it didn't really inspire me. Similarly to another book I have read recently, there are three stories interwoven into this novel and only the historical one about India at the time of Partition was the one I was really interested in. I don't know much about India or its history so this small part did frame some aspects for me. Others may find the descriptions of family life in Calcutta in the 1970s interesting. The foreign gay scene in London in the 1980s didn't really seem to fit for me.

[P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Past Continuous announced the debut of Neel Mukherjee as a novelist who was theretofore famous for his brilliant book reviews. (If you haven't read his reviews yet, I strongly suggest you do. They're as good as reviews can get.) It won some minor literary prizes here and there but did not manage to catapult him into the kind of fame that he deserved and garnered later post his Booker nomination for The Lives of Others.

This book carries two narratives - of an Indian student living in the 21st century UK and of an English woman living in India at the dawn of the 20th century. It's bleak and brutal as you'd expect a Neel Mukherjee novel to be. But it doesn't succeed in its ambitions to the extent The Lives of Others managed to.

The prose is delicious and Neel conjures phrases and metaphors like a wizard. The characters are well-defined and the themes are powerfully brought out. We are taken through a labyrinth of themes - Poverty, family, despair, escape, pointless addiction, lust, adventure, society, racism, xenophobia, etc. - that synchronize beautifully like the instruments in an orchestra to dictate the coming-of-age tale of our protagonist Ritwik who is born into a lower middle class family in Calcutta, abused violently (I mean VIOLENTLY) by his kinda well-meaning mother (typical middle class mother who only wants her kids to succeed but with a notoriously sadistic streak) and luckily escapes to England on an Oxford scholarship post the death of his parents in quick succession.

Reading about the childhood of Ritwik made me realize how lucky I was in my own. Constantly starving due to poverty, he has nothing to eat for the most part of his childhood. As if the torture of scorching hunger wasn't enough, he has to face the mocking of his friends when his stomach rumbles during the school assembly and ashamed to admit his hunger, he resorts to several lies and is punished by his teachers for his mendacity. At home, he is viciously punished by his mother who jumps at the slightest of the chances to thrash him, beat him senselessly until he bleeds. At one point she actually grabs him and flings him across the room because he couldn't memorize a sentence from his textbook. Her anger is understandable (but not condonable) because of the pathetic state of her life - she is married to someone 33 years elder, she is brought up in abject poverty, her own childhood was egregious, her 60-yr old husband gives up a proper apartment in a good neighborhood and she has to face the humiliation of returning back to her mother's home where her four useless, unemployed brothers constantly thrash their paralytic mother for money. And she takes out all her anger at her son, and how he suffers! His life is human tragedy stretched to its extremity. Soon after the death of his parents, he is exhilarated when he is selected for an Oxford scholarship and is keen on beginning a new life in England leaving behind an apology of an existence. (This is kind of a reverse We Need to talk about Kevin where the son is innocent but the mother's a psychopath.)

This is not the typical immigrant novel that looks back at homeland with nostalgia and sweet longing. Ritwik wants to escape Bengal, to never come back again and to sever all kinds of connections he might have with his native country. He's prepared to risk anything to never face again the land of his nightmarish childhood. I've read several books about flagrant family lives but Neel Mukherjee's books stand apart in some way revealing the appalling hatred on which most Indian families miserably thrive.

This book is said to be semi-autobiographical and Ritwik is said to be closely based on Neel himself. I sincerely pray and hope that his childhood was light years away from the horrifying perdition that was Ritwik's.

The second storyline involves an unmarried Englishwoman living in the early 1900s invited to edify Occidental etiquette to a progressive Zamindar's wife. Through her, we get a glimpse of Bengal just before it was partitioned hatefully by the British government. She is condescending towards Indians in her own way, but she is more committed towards the progress of the natives than most of her fellow countrymen.

Both the stories are narrated in alternative chapters; with Ritwik's story being the more interesting in the first part and the Englishwoman's story sustaining our interest while Ritwik's narrative flounders in the second.

Towards the end, the book loses steam and anticlimaxes into a desultory, random, avoidable and infuriating end.

Past Continuous was originally published in India and later published as A Life Apart in the UK. I had both the versions and therefore compared every chapter between the books while reading. The UK version omits a few chapters pertaining to Ritwik's difficult childhood, but it has some additional chapters that explain certain things that are missing in the Indian edition. For example, the Indian version never explains what happened to Ritwik's brother after he leaves for England. And expectantly, some lines that may offend English people are expurgated in the UK version.

Despite the clumsy second part, this book deserves 4 stars. But Neel Mukherjee is capable of so much more, and hence the rather cruel 3 stars.

[Adam Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slow burn of a novel, like a long hot bath you don't want to get out of, content to just sit.
Must read more by this author.

[Sidharthan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

*spoilers interspersed*

Neel Mukherjee's debut novel has some sparks of brilliance. I loved the portrayal of the mother-son relationship. Neel Mukherjee doesn't shy away from detailing the brutality, but he still manages to capture the twisted logic behind it. The mother is shown as a monster, but the events that led her to be who she is are also explained, making the character more than just a caricature.

I also loved the descriptions of the protagonist, Ritwik's cruising experiences. The scene is captured vividly and Neel Mukherjee dissects the various aspects of it - from the need for intimacy, the thrill of meeting an unknown stranger or of being caught and the mixture of all this while Ritwik waits. I was expecting the same flair to be there when we get to the end of the book and Ritwik starts doing the same for money, but it was missing.

There are also many parts of the book that just felt randomly placed. Although the whole aside of Miss. Gilby's story is interesting, it doesn't add anything to the main storyline. I was expecting it to intersect somehow with Ritwik's mother. But the whole mother-son relationship is given up once we get to the second part of the book. Anne, a mother of another gay son acts as a replacement, but this also doesn't go anywhere. The book just devolves into tropes and doesn't have the emotional impact that the first half does.

There are also some characters like Saeed that feel very underexplored. Overall though, this is a very good read.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compulsive, unflinching and accomplished debut novel.

The book alternates two main strands, that contrast the experiences of the English in India at the turn of the century and a literate, lonely Bengali orphan's experiences of England, initially on a scholarship to Oxford and later in the underworld of illegal immigrants in London, interwoven with a gay coming of age story. The historical part is presented as the work of the hero of the modern part, and tells the story of an English woman educating a landowner's wife.

Mukherjee is clearly interested in many things, and historical, political, economic and social ideas are never far from the surface.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the style of writing- distinct voices telling parallel stories of immigrant experiences. Both the character and plot parallels were clever and pointed and added a richness to the story. I did feel there were a lot of tangential characters and incidents that didn't evolve or add much - but overall I enjoyed the book - particularly the descriptions of expats in India during the beginning of the 20th century.

[Melissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't get interested, characters not very accessible and story moved way too slow.

[martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two migrants: one modern, a young gay Indian man who overstays his UK student visa hoping to build a future far from painful memories of Calcutta; the other Edwardian, an educated British woman who joins her bureaucrat brother in Raj era Bengal and devotes herself to trying to improve Bengali women's education against a backdrop of political and social upheaval. Both outsiders, both in a sense illegal, both sadly naive.

This novel is often uncomfortable reading (at least for anyone who is British, Indian or Pakistani), making us think about our often abusive, exploitative treatment of migrants, refugees and others who are different, as well as the crimes and misdeeds of rulers and ruled in Imperial India. However it's also a fascinating, if slightly flawed read. I found the writing beautiful, even in the most sordid moments like Ritwik's frenzied addiction to cottaging in Oxford. I also found many characters interesting, especially Anne and Bimala.

Why flawed, then? For an Oxford student Ritwik is at times irritatingly weak, naive and even clueless. I also found it hard to believe he would overstay in the UK when his experiences there are so grey and empty. Perhaps I wasn't convinced that anyone would be so blindly desperate to abandon India simply because his (deceased) mother was so viciously abusive. With such an education he'd surely easily be able to escape Calcutta's poverty and his wider family's clutches? The Zafar character just doesn't work for me either. Too much of a stereotype or just not sufficiently developed, maybe?

Most of all though, I felt there were just too many unresolved or incomplete story lines. I'd be interested to read Neel Mukherjee's later novels though as I enjoyed reading this one despite these few question marks

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Razor sharp-prose; but dark and sad and seedy.

[S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.. Just another brick in the wall.. That Dostoievski so wanted to destroy..

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

I was lucky enough to receive this through a Goodreads Giveaway. As a first novel, it certainly has its flaws, but, as a whole, it has enough heart, passion, and beauty to overcome them and make this an unexpectedly affecting reading experience.

First of all, the back-cover blurb (which is also used as the summary here) does a very poor job of selling the book, in my opinion. If it peaks your interest in the slightest, I would give the book a shot because it's honestly about a hundred times better than the incredibly vague blurb would imply. A lot of the plot points were really unexpected, and the book ended up being something wholly different than I was initially anticipating.

Its interest lies mainly in the character of Ritwik and his development over the course of the novel. Despite his enigmatic, reserved qualities, he quickly becomes a relatable and likable character. In some ways, he reminded me of a character like Jude from A Little Life; their experiences aren't necessarily comparable, but they're both the kind of character you root for and want so badly to have a happy ending even though you know deep down there isn't one coming. In that sense, it's a really difficult, upsetting book to read but also an important and emotionally-compelling one.

There were only two things that majorly stood out to me as problems. First, I felt like the initial desperation behind Ritwik's choice to remain in London illegally could have been made clearer. As it was, I didn't fully understand why he chose this option since it didn't read as though he had thoroughly explored more legal means of staying in the country and realized them impossible. If more time had been spent on fleshing out his reasoning, I think this element could have made more sense. Second, the ending did seem quite rushed, particularly the sequence of events leading to the flash decision that culminated in Ritwik's ultimate fate. It all happened within just a few pages, which made it feel less realistic and more like the book just needed to end that way.

Still, these were small issues in the grand scheme of things and hindered my enjoyment and appreciation of the book very little. I enthusiastically recommend this to anyone who doesn't mind having their heart ripped out of their chest by a fictional character's experiences every now and then.

[Shekha · Rating 3 out of 5]

CONTAINS SPOILERS - Some quick thoughts - I found this book enjoyable, grim but wryly written with a kind of dark humour that I really appreciated. As I think more about the book the layers go deeper - yes this is a book about A Life Apart - Ritwik's but also the immigrant workers, Miss Gilby, Anna, the widows in Bimala's household - all outsiders in their own right and you get a glimpse of their stories too.

Unlike some readers, I actually preferred Mukherjee's second novel but I am finding it hard to articulate why. I think I found some of Ritwik's decisions incomprehensible like going to Kings X at the end, I understood to be an act of defiance but just thought it was a bit stupid. If I'm right on the time period, he would have had a better and safer time in a Soho nightclub.

The relationships, between Miss Gilby and Bimala, Anna and Ritwik were touching to read, tender and the threat of impermanence that haunted both relationships was effectively portrayed. Anne was really intriguing, vacant, incontinent but full of a world of buried knowledge and a gift of reading people "fucking clairvoyant psychoterrorist" easily one of my favourite phrases now. Learning about Miss Gilby in colonial India was a highlight, like in the Lives of Others, the food descriptions and the vivid poetry of Bengal were excellent.

I also really enjoyed the slow reveal of Zafar's occupation and his link, with wider seedy criminal underbelly of 90s London. I loved how the idea of criminality in the city was depicted as multi-storey, yet still connected, that a successful arms trader could have associations with someone like Saeed, and in turn how Saeed could be an associate of Mr Haq, in an interesting twist of the "immigrant comes and opens shops and makes money in England" formula.

All in all a good read but the key flaw was that the ending was too abrupt. The conclusion felt premature and could haev been more graceful By the time you come around to enjoy and start to care about the characters, the book ends - although maybe that was always the intended effect.

[Jee Koh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alienated from his new country, the literary immigrant wants to prove that he belongs, how else, but by credibly, and thus creditably, narrating a story from the point of view of a native informant. In Mukherjee's debut novel, the protagonst Rikwit Ghosh brings to life the bit character of Miss Gilby, an Englishwoman in Raj India, from the Rabindranath Tagore story "Bimala's autobiography." The story about how Miss Gilby becomes the tutor of Bimala, the wife of an enlightened zamindar, and subsequently falls victim to inter-religious conflict in Bengal is expertly told. The expertise is the point, for Rikwit who is anything but an expert in navigating the life of a queer Indian scholarship student at Oxford and then that of an undocumented immigrant. In fact, his life is a mess. He spends his Oxford career cruising for men in an underground public bathroom and goes down to prostitution in a very dark corner of London. He is most certainly not a model immigrant. I find most interesting the first part of the novel which depicts the growing-up years in Bengal and the last part which brings to the light the life and plight of "floating" workers looking for temporary farming or construction jobs. The middle part about Oxford I find rather tedious since I cannot bring myself to care for any of the students, not even Rikwit himself. Rikwit's realization at Oxford that his mother's harsh discipline is considered child abuse in the new country leads nowhere. It reinforces the motif of violence running through the novel but does not develop into fundamental insight about cultural relativism.

[Alka · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first of this author, he tends to explain a bit too much, so much so that it hampers the narrative. story could have been made very taut but it spends much time dwelling on old age, child punishment, homosexuality, prostitution, illegal immigrants and such issues. No doubt, these aspects are part of the story but there is too much of explanation apportioned to each, breaking the flow of story. Ritwik is an Indian from slums of Calcutta on scholarship to Oxford and then degenerates into a person living in shady fringes of society. The rationale for this decline is supposed to be rooted in his upbringing, which was a difficult to digest.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strong meat for my taste - the parallel story of the narrator, a young Indian who, having watched the funeral pyres of his parent and encountered his mother's ghost, leaves for Oxford, where he writes the fictional memoirs of an Edwardian Englishwoman in Bengal who falls in love with her Bengali employer (given in full) and lives the life of a student/cruiser of public men's rooms.
When you've lived this sort of life, reading about it is otiose.

[Alan Keslian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fiction of substance giving a contemporary experience and view of Indian/British Empire relationship through the eyes of a gay immigrant to the UK from the sub-continent.
Some excellent writing, good insights into human experience, but a rather grim ending. Recommended to anyone who reads because of an interest in life, rather than those seeking an amusing diversion from it.

[Aparajita]

Well, could only stomach half..the violence, the rage and hopelessness was too much to get through..want to try again..

[ARK · Rating 4 out of 5]

completely engrossing. mukherjee's writing is amazing--somber, precise, and affecting.

[Sryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always enjoy reading about India, past and present, and this book has some intriguing stories, but it's kind of a puzzle where the pieces don't quite fit.

[Manas Saloi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had high expectations from this one after reading 'Life of others'. Was not that great.

[Kavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

He had read somewhere that cliches are cliches because they are universally accepted truths, tried and tested generations after generations.

No one in the house intervened to save him. It was necessary disciplining, the rod that taught and educated. Without this just measure of pain, how would a child ever learn to be diligent about his studies? It was an unspoken law of the Bengali household that whatever a mother meted out to her children, it was right and motivated by unconditional love. It couldn't be questioned: everything worked for the greater good of the child.

'I don't want to live in a squalor any more. I don't want to go down the way of my father , helpless and exploited , unable to escape. I don't want to become him. If I return there, they will now attach their suckers on to me. Life out there will just carry on running in the same groove, decade after decade. I want a different life', he said to Gavin.

Before I start my review I got to say the ending left me shattered, devastated and heart broken. I was like woah what just happened here? It's like a wonderfully sculptured art and someone splashed contrasting colour on it. Now let me start with me review. This is one of a kind contemporary novel, the author sets the mode of it at chapter Zero presumably the prologue. This novel consist of two different and connected stories, yes that's right, a story within a story, one being of Ritwik and the other Ms Gilby.

Let me start with Ritwik's story. The author did a wonderful job by introducing his character as a person moved to England in search for a new life; from his life in Calcutta as a child and him getting a scholarship to study in England. How he so badly doesn't want to go back to India and life the live of hardship as how his father suffered. He would do anything to remain in England even though it he had to live with Ms Anne, an eighty six year old and in constant need for care. Consequently going down the dark path. While being a lonely person Ritwik remembered a movie he watched back in Calcutta, a character name Ms Gilby, he used that character and developed his own story. Ritwik began to understand the difference of norms example was the child abuse scene. The author brought up his habit of "cottaging" to get rid of those loneliness and eventually leading to making money from it. I just don't don't understand what the author had in mind, he started of Ritwik so well just to give such a tragic end towards his character. I just cannot.

Next would be Ms Gilby. I got to say I enjoyed her story. The author introduced her a well educated English woman came to India as a Governess. She was approached by Mr Roy to be a Governess to his wife Bimala. Her story took place pre and post India Partition. The author did a great job in showing the difference in treatment pre partition and post partition. She was a very empowering character, she saw the oppression among Indian woman and wanted to educate them to come out of the box. I admire how she wanted the woman to be educated in English and she also together could learned and understand their culture. After the partition and the Swadeshi movement there was a huge shift. It was amazingly executed and had a good ending towards her character. Ritwik while taking care of Ms Anne had add one some of her ideas into Ms Gilby's story example those exotic birds.

Overall its a great book. If you enjoy reading contemporary stories, especially about moving and finding a place in a foreign land I would recommend this. I enjoyed this despite there were certain disturbing part of the story. It came to my awareness that this is Neel's first depute novel, amazingly written.

[Vishal Choradiya · Rating 3 out of 5]

“A Life Apart”, first published as “Past Continuous”, is Neel Mukherjee’s debut novel. It narrates the parallel stories of two individuals experiencing the anxieties and possibilities of cultural dislocation. The protagonist is a young, orphaned gay man who is looking to escape the trauma of an abusive childhood in Calcutta by leaving for Oxford to read English literature. To cope with his sense of alienation in a foreign land and the loss of his mother, he takes to writing about the imagined experiences of a British woman who teaches English and etiquette to young Indian women from zamindari families in colonial Bengal. Based on a character making a fleeting appearance in Tagore’s “Ghare Bairey”, she becomes the subject of the book’s second strand that is developed in alternating chapters.

Both stories are told with a conscious sense of place and resonances across time. The first one explores the apprehensions of a migrant student in late 20th century England, with gratuitous descriptions of sex addiction and cruising in public washrooms, followed by the hardships of surviving as an undocumented immigrant—involving precarious jobs such as fruit-picking, warehouse packing, and streetwalking. This world is inverted in the second story, in which the sister of a British district collector slowly discovers the exploitation of the Raj and its malicious divide and rule policies as her journey unfolds during the swadeshi movement and rising communal tensions following the first partition of Bengal. Even as both of them learn to navigate socio-cultural differences—symbolised by the motif of birds to suggest movement or a lack of fixity—larger forces of history converge on them with devastating consequences.

Mukherjee’s prose is promising, but suffers from inconsistency—poetic flourishes are interspersed with laboured attempts at profundity or plain mediocrity. The two discrete strands never cohere in any convincing way, and a weak, mostly episodic plot—with glaring omissions, a sagging middle, and key supporting characters left underdeveloped—ends with unsatisfying haste. But if you must still read him, safely skip to his second work of fiction, “The Lives of Others”.