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Every year I make it a point to read one book of Chaudhuri. His books are an indulgence both at an aesthetic and an intellectual level. I know it's rather difficult to separate the two and it does disservice to create such unnecessary binaries. But let me explain what I mean by the two. In this 1993-novel, Chaudhuri moves away from Calcutta that was the setting of his debut. Here, we are taken to Oxford and Bombay. Calcutta features occasionally but starkly different from his first book. We follow a student who is researching on D.H. Lawrence. He is a young boy who befriends another Indian boy from rural North India. He is going on dates and having sex with two Indian girls his age. He is in Oxford for a global experience but the narrator's engagement with people in the UK are getting more Indian as days go by. You see, this is what I am speaking of. Chaudhuri indulged me with his charming style, of a scholar studying D.H. Lawrence (one of my favourite writers) and his flâneur extravaganza. I was luxuriating in the beautifully thought out descriptions of the narrator, of a young boy born to Bengali parents, bred in Bombay always used to seeing his life in transition. It made me think of his comportment through music, musings from his past, and how he is finding the same raag here in a distant locale. He knows his existence here, like his friends' is fleeting, temporary and yet he is unable to feel free of the roots that he has already found in Oxford and with Lawrence. The music that made him into a man he feels dissociated with in Oxford is what binds him to the people he surrounds himself with. They don't play the instrument, or sing but they seem to be lured by his attachment to it. If read closely, you see the flawed nature of the urban, middle-class gaze of a man running throughout the text. They offer a cadence, a story more to do with what it means to simply exist. As Mantel as rightly described him, his books are Proustian and that succeeds every time for Chaudhuri.