In Amitabha Bagchi’s Unknown City, Arindam is now a nearly fifty-year-old novelist and professor. He revisits past relationships to uncover how his understanding of love and identity has transformed over time. An excerpt from the book below with permisson from HarperCollins India.
Going back over the narrative of the events leading to Supriya’s asking me to take a break from communicating, which turned into, as I feared it would, a formal disengagement from our relationship, I can see that there are certain problems in the way I have presented it to myself over the years and in the way I have presented it here. The most glaring problem, of course, is that the narrative revolves around me, going something like this: I allow my failed ambition to reduce me to a snivelling fool; Supriya decides that she has had enough of me and transfers her affection to another man who is, presumably, better able to handle his own shit and, additionally, is more presentable to the social circle she wishes to move in; Supriya first cools towards me and then, in New York, is cruel to me before eventually cutting me off. My fatal flaw of being ‘too demanding’ initiates a sequence of unfortunate events, evoking pity and fear in the reader—feelings that are purged when the sequence reaches a denouement at—where else?—an airport, and the Aristotelean scheme of tragedy is neatly completed. On closer examination, some of the basic assumptions in this narrative chain appear less than robust. For example, there is an assumption that prior to April 2000, all was well with our relationship and we both wanted the same things. This now appears patently false to me. Thinking back and looking back over the email folder, it is clear now that what Supriya was looking for was friendship, companionship and, above all, a sense of ease and comfort in a relationship. I, on the other hand, was looking for intelligent repartee and a fine sensibility, and also the generosity needed to not just help me through the two complex processes of becoming a writer and getting a PhD but also to hold my hand if I fell sick. I think I was able to provide her with laughter and ease a lot of the time, but when the conversation turned to the things I wanted—actually the word is probably ‘needed’—that ease went away. Imagine a piece of furniture that is half overstuffed sofa and half barstool. I can see why she wouldn’t have been comfortable.
One may ask why Supriya was so keen on ease, why she was so reluctant to train an ear to the inner clamour that plays within each one of us. It may have had something to do with her growing up being told that emotions are things that need to be controlled, or it may have been that women who are seeking professional success are so often told that they are ‘too emotional’ that they begin to deny the sovereignty of their emotions over their actions, even to themselves and, eventually, look to suppress these emotions that are so easily used as weapons against them. In Supriya’s case, both these reasons seem to have been at play. I, on the other hand, had somehow discovered in my solitude that the inner tumult had an aesthetic quality to it, and if you listened carefully and worked with the grain, you could turn it into writing. This, it can’t be denied, sounds like an attempt to put the lipstick of artistic endeavour on the pig that is self-pity. As most writers and people who know writers know, the downside of being overly aware of your inner life is that it brings anxiety and neuroses, and very few people are able to stay on the correct side of the fine line that separates snivelling narcissism from disinterested self-examination for the purposes of writing something that might benefit a reader. But denying the inner life its voice can cause other problems. Be that as it may, the point is that Supriya and I had fundamentally different approaches to our selves and, when viewed in this way, it emerges that parting earlier rather than later was probably better for us. I shudder to think how such a fault line would have played out in high-stakes settings like parenting a child or managing a parent’s terminal illness, for example. I should clarify that Supriya was capable of feeling very deeply—she wept when Milosevic was overthrown, for example, and barked at me when I suggested that the Western media was overplaying it. But that intensity of feeling was allowed to come to the surface only for larger things, like the events in Yugoslavia, or for other people like her roommate Nalini or the assassinated student leader Chandrashekhar. Despite having witnessed her responses in these situations and been puzzled by their intensity in the case of Nalini, I didn’t make the connection that the provenance of such intensity may have been her own repressed fears and anxieties.
Date 27.01.2025