A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled.
A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled.
A Life Apart follows the highly unsentimental education of Ritwik Ghosh, a poor but clever boy from Calcutta, who wins a scholarship to study English at Oxford but overstays his visa and winds up scratching a living as an illegal farmworker and eventually as a rent boy. Ritwik’s engaging story is spliced with the less enthralling tale that he is writing about Miss Gilby, a minor character from a novel by the Indian Nobel prize- winner Rabindranath Tagore, who is the governess to a Bengali woman during the first partition of India.
Though there are parallels between the two characters — both are innocents abroad, ill-at-ease in the culture they come from and the culture they have entered — Miss Gilby is an unnecessary distraction and the link between her and Anne Cameron, the old lady for whom Ritwik acts as a live-in carer, feels both strained and under-explored. However, Ritwik’s tender but exasperating relationship with Anne is one of the best aspects of the book.
Similarly absorbing are the scenes with the shady Zafar bin Hashm, a married Arab businessman, who picks Ritwik up in King’s Cross and keeps him on a retainer.
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