Letting others into his world

By Ayesha R. Rafiq

Amal Chatterjee is full of energy, one who can hardly sit still for a minute. But his childlike joy and enthusiasm hides a deep and obviously intelligent personality.

Here is someone to whom 'roots' don't just mean those brown things you find at the bottom of a tree. He identifies strongly with the country of his upbringing. Amal is half Sri Lankan and half Indian, and "proud of it", but having only spent the first three years of his life in Sri Lanka, admits to not being too familiar with it.

Although he's just had his first book published, he has none of that 'burn-out' that most authors complain of. Instead, he's already two thirds of the way through his second book and talking of a third and a fourth. And this from someone whose mother christened him lazy.

But there's something else that's unusual about Amal. His book Across the Lakes talks about Calcutta, a city he left behind a decade ago. He has lived in Scotland for the past 10 years.

Why not then a book based in Scotland, where he has been living for so long now. "Because I'm Indian," comes the simple reply, which is later to become a conversational tic, and is convincing because of the way he subconsciously refers to Indians as we instead of they.

"While I was in India I taught Arithmetic to the children in the slums, although I teach English as a Second Language at the University of Glasgow now. That is when I came to realise exactly how prevalent the class system is, as opposed to the caste system. In India, whether you're rich or poor really makes a difference, and this transcends even the caste barrier. I never really understood this,"he said.

When asked how he could then write an entire book based on it, he's quick to point out that his book doesn't hold any answers either. He has only asked 'why', and consciously held back from being judgmental. "Hey, I've got my faults too, everybody does, it's not human not to. I'm just wondering why this particular issue has to be the way it is."

Across the Lake, which took Amal a mere six months to complete, portrays the lives of a group of twenty-something, upper middle and lower class adults, whose lives are impossibly brought together by a foreigner's death. The novel also contains undertones of politics, through which Amal addresses one of his pet subjects, political corruption. But far from crossing the bridges that divide them, as the title of the novel seems to suggest, the book portrays exactly how the gap cannot be bridged.

The lakes, in this cases are a set of tanks in Calcutta called the Dhakuria tanks where people go in the evenings to 'hang-out'.On one side of the tanks live the rich and on the other side the poor, hence the title, Amal explains.

Talking to Amal is rather difficult at times. So involved is he in trying to squeeze his life into an hour of conversation, that getting him to stick to the point is a Herculean task.

But this is also what makes him so interesting to talk to. In him you won't find the serious author who reforms the world in his spare time, or the dreamy one buried in his own world,oblivious to life around him. As his wife Susan says, he seems to have the rare ability to 'just dive into what he is writing' and talk everyone else into silence at one moment, and crack a joke about himself the next.

His family is spread across the world, but the one thing they have in common, is their dedication to social issues. His Sri Lankan mother is dedicated to the cause of street children, his eldest brother is a barefoot doctor and the other an environmental journalist.

Amal too likes travelling and has visited many European countries. But this is only the third time he has been to Sri Lanka-the country of his birth. The first thing he said he noticed about Sri Lanka was that it's a more divided country than India. "Seeing armed policemen on the roads and checkpoints at every corner is quite scary ," he said. But he relishes the food, especially the pol sambol.

For a debut novelist Amal is encouraged by his success so far. He's sold about 7000 copies and the reviews he has received, both from friends and critics is encouraging.

"Many people who read the book said it sounded like it was written by someone who has lived in Calcutta all his life, and a close friend even told me he didn't know how Indian I was until he had read the book."

He says he has finally got used to seeing his book on the shelves in bookshops. When it first came out in India he had walked into every book store in the area where he was staying just to make sure it was there.

"But just when you think you're famous and people may actually have heard of you, something happens to bring you down to earth. Like the time when I had a book signing in Calcutta and nobody showed up," he says unabashedly.

Hopefully things will go better for him at the launch of his book here in Colombo on March 5. It's scheduled for 5.00 p.m. along with a reading, at the Lake House bookshop, which he proudly tells me has sold out all the copies of his book.

Writing he says is not just a hobby or a job, but a way of life. "It's a fact of being, for me. I don't really have any choice but to write. That's how addicted to it I am. I suppose what I like most about it is that when I write I am putting something of myself down on paper, and letting other people into my world. And for me, that sharing is special."

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