An assistant professor of English at Stanford University, Majumdar had left India a decade ago but promptly returned to his home city in his first novel. He takes a long, hard look at its society, evocatively analyses the past and the present and eventually paints a vivid picture of the city on the verge of decay. For someone who was surrounded by books, Majumdar, 34, started work on his own three years ago, balancing his day job with his alternative existence as a writer. “As trite as it may sound, I wanted to write about the common man in modern-day Kolkata, with a subtext that went back to the past. I thought it would be an interesting device to straddle both worlds at once,” he says.
Silverfish is a tale of two Kolkatas — the city where Kamal, a young widow, is bound to a life of suffering by virtue of being married into an aristocratic family and the metropolis of today, where Milan, an old schoolteacher, is caught in the lethargy of the bureaucracy. “Though their lives are over 100 years apart, some episodes in their lives are eerily similar. They are powerless against the times they live in,” he says. “The babu culture fascinates me. I don’t have a lived relationship with the city anymore, but every time I return, I find that some things just don’t change,” he says. Majumdar’s elegant prose effortlessly moves back and forth the two Kolkatas as he captures the lives of the two characters. While Kamal’s narrative is written in the first person, Milan’s is in third, a delicate mix of the personal narrative and the public one.
Majumdar is now working on his second novel, which he describes as more “global”. “The book is set in flights, and historical stories weave themselves into such a setting,” he says. And Kolkata will return.