Boyd Tonkin

Return to the lost city

Amit Chaudhuri revisits the city of his youth, brimming with memories of his ‘unfathomable’ friend Ramu

issue 26 August 2017

During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge of bile’ against the novel. That imperialist bully of a genre has ‘squatted on the writer’s life’ and defines his ‘sense of worth or lack of it’. Our narrator, as it happens, is named ‘Amit Chaudhuri’.

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