On page 450, exactly halfway through Great Eastern Hotel, Ruchir Joshi’s 900-page behemoth of a historical novel, I stopped reading the book to assess what I felt about it.
Even at this point there was no sense of any actual story coming through. The setting had been fully and brilliantly established: Calcutta between the years 1942 and 1946, beginning with Rabindranath Tagore’s death and vaguely ending with the Bengal famine, complete with the fear of a Japanese invasion as World War II drew closer and closer to British India, with Calcutta being target No. 1.
A wonderful cast of main characters had been introduced, consisting of Nirupama, a young communist, Kedar from a family well off enough to attend parties with India’s British overlords, Imogen, a British woman bored witless in Calcutta after experiencing the war firsthand in France, Jeremy Lambert, an air force man stuck behind a desk as part of a secret intelligence organisation, and Gopal, a pickpocket just ‘promoted’ to black marketeer by his gang leader. There was also a vast number of secondary and tertiary characters, just as there ought to be in a city as large as Calcutta.
So the scene had been set, the main characters had been introduced, each one going about her or his life in the city, just regular inhabitants like you and me in our own cities. But beyond that, nothing seemed to be happening. And yet, the book had me fully engaged. I could put it down, yes. In fact, I had put it down just a day earlier, so I could read another book — one with a fast pace and lots of action. But having finished the thriller, I hadn’t so much wanted to get back into the world of Great Eastern Hotel as I’d needed to inhabit those pages again. And when I got back into it, it was with a huge sense of relief. I felt as though I’d come home.
That sense of home was both metaphorical and literal. The latter is because I was born in Calcutta and lived there for the first 23 years of my life, and Joshi has managed the impossible with this book — he has captured every nuance and quirk of Calcutta and its people, everything that makes the city both unique and ubiquitously Indian. The former is because the city is so brilliantly delineated that you don’t even have to be from Calcutta to feel that you are an inextricable part of what you’re reading.
This was such an extraordinary achievement on the part of the writer that ultimately, when I got to the end of the book, I didn’t care that the plot was near invisible. I didn’t care that there were often tedious passages that made my eyes cross. I didn’t care that the characters existed not because the author had a burning desire to tell a story about them, but only to make history come alive — which it did, oh, how it did, and from every possible angle, creating shivers up my spine. All I thought was, I am so happy I read this book. So happy that I think I’m going to cry.
Great Eastern Hotel
By Ruchir Joshi
HarperCollins
pp. 900; Rs 1,499
