But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for. Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds the chance to start a new life when he arrives in England from Calcutta. shockingly good.' Rose Tremain, Daily Telegraph. Calcutta native Mukherjee ( The Lives of Others) illuminates the crevices of shame and despair with his beautiful prose. by Neel Mukherjee (Author) 'A brilliant first novel. Interspersed throughout the book are installments of Ritwik’s own forays into fiction, imagining one Miss Maud Gilby: a minor character from a Tagore novel and an intrepid, early 20th-century British woman intent on educating Indian women. Throughout this time, which is set in the early days of AIDS, Ritwik finds men with whom he can have brief, furtive encounters in bathroom stalls and on unlit backstreets, never learning their names, never allowing himself affection or trust. Ritwik is unable to shake the trauma of his mother’s cruelty, punishing himself once she no longer can. His loneliness follows him to rainy rural England, where a scholarship gets him two years in university, and then on to London, where he stays without working papers. Following his mother’s death, and soon after his father’s, protagonist Ritwik is surprised to find himself entirely alone in his Calcutta neighborhood at age 21, not nearly as happy as he’d hoped he’d be with his mother gone (she was both the “proudest” mother in the area and, seemingly, the most abusive, “always on the edge of fury,” if not in its throes).
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