‘The Hush of the Uncaring Sea’: Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novellas are rooted in both fact and fiction

“Time passed, it seemed to him, not so much because the sun sank almost imperceptibly in the sky but because it changed colour in its descent. Its yellow turned to light orange and with it, the water around him too changed tones. Immediately surrounding the raft, it became a sort of dirty lemon-green like fresh sugar cane juice but further away, it was gunmetal grey right till the distance where, almost as straight as an enormous ruler, he could see a band as blue as the Sulekha ink that they used to use in school.”

Abani, a boy of indeterminate age, possibly 18, maybe 19 – no one can tell with certainty because no one has ever cared enough – is lost at sea and has no measure of time except the changing colours of an infinite sky and fathomless water. The colours he identifies are all shades of a middle-class existence in the small towns of India. Upamanyu Chatterjee has a way of writing the real into his stories, investing the ordinary with a little bit of the magic of resonance. In his latest collection, The Hush of the Uncaring Sea: Novellas (2018–20125), he brings together four novellas written between 2018 and 2025. The reader familiar with his writing might already have a roadmap: wry humour, a cast of intensely unlikeable characters, the underdog you would desperately root for, and a consuming concern with the human condition. While this compendium does tick all those boxes, it goes a little bit further, pulling together four distinctly different narratives, each, something of a historical piece, set in the past, but disconcertingly close to the present.

Abani’s story

The opening, eponymous narrative, The Hush of the Uncaring Sea, tells the story of the aforementioned Abani, orphaned at a young age, and dependent on the largesse of his uncle, Dulal Nath. General dogsbody of Nath’s family, Abani goes to the merchant vessel of his brother-in-law, to collect foreign goods that were meant to be gifted to the family (a veritable luxury in pre-liberalisation India), and inadvertently, is locked in a cabin while the ship embarks on its 40-day journey from Calcutta to Rotterdam. Not quite a stowaway, Abani is still unwanted baggage aboard the ship. To ensure that the ship is not delayed in the process of returning its unaccounted-for passenger to land, and so the world of commerce remains uninterrupted, the captain decides on the piratical solution of leaving the boy to the mercy of the sea, erasing all records of his presence. In Abani’s own, achingly simple words, “I overslept and so they threw me into the sea.” In a style distinctly Chatterjee’s own, the rest of the story unfolds with its protagonist largely passive, allowing things to happen to him, placing the burden of responsibility on the actors around him and the wide, expansive sea that keeps him alive.

Enter Basant Kumar Bal

In The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian, first published as an independent novella in 2018, Chatterjee explores the amorphous space of morality. A family of six is butchered by the servant, Basant Kumar Bal, ostensibly, for never having been allowed to eat the rich, meat-laden meals the Dalvis partook of themselves. The murder is not a whodunit. Bal’s villainy is apparent in the first few pages of the story. The act of violence is the pushback of the small man, an inversion of power structures, complicated by attendant hierarchies of religion and class. In his detailing of the vagaries of the legal system, the long-drawn wait for justice and its immediate counterpoint in the interminable wait of the perpetrator on death row, Chatterjee lays open the fault lines of the system as also the socio-cultural spaces that sanction it.

Based on a true-ish story

The Stink of Red Herring is based on the first case of India’s first private detective, Prem Kumar, who started his detective agency in Delhi in 1961. Having upset his District Civil Surgeon father by quitting his Civil Engineering degree in the US for the uncertain life of a private investigator, Prem is asked to go to Patiala to stay with his uncle, Jaswant, retired bureaucrat and practising poet, to de-escalate the tension between father and son. In Patiala, Prem pursues the case of a missing four-year-old, abducted from within the safety of his home. Red herrings aplenty, as promised by the title, the narrative has the detective-outsider exploding the equanimity of a self-contained, close-knit community. The world Prem encounters is deeply patriarchal, where women are often nameless and frequently have no existence outside of the kitchen – making endless cups of chai, and feeding perpetually hungry children. Grief is an abominable ugliness in this world, never allowed to sit by itself, crowded out by a plague of visiting neighbours and relatives.

With tongue-firmly-in-cheek

The final piece in this quartet, The Hapless Prince, set in Bhawanipur, a fictional princely state in colonial India, can be read as tongue-firmly-in-cheek postcolonial response to the Greyfriars School stories written by Charles Hamilton in the early decades of the 20th century. Hariram Jamset is a rebel king, acutely aware of the daily degradations that the Empire forced on all its subjects, ordinary and royal. Drawing on the character of the Indian Prince sent to an English public school in Hamilton’s Billy Bunter stories, Chatterjee explores the possibilities of what happens when a young man, born to privilege, realises that power is a sliding scale. Hariram is a visionary ruler who wants to create a school “that would – in its revolutionary, modern methods – outshine any English public school”. His people need education to “become worthy of freedom”, he insists. The story plays with the idea of haplessness, of individuals caught in situations they cannot control, even as it navigates the complex historicity of the Raj and the many eccentricities of its inhabitants.

Unlikely protagonists

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s writing is often about unlikely protagonists. His recent work gave us Parmatma in Villainy (2022), growing up in the shadow of his rich friend, forced to take the fall for a crime he had not committed. In Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, winner of the 2024 JCB Prize for Literature, 21-year-old Lorenzo Bonifacio of Aquilinia, Italy, sets out on a spiritual quest that has him living a life of renunciation. All four novellas in the present selection are similar. Abani is unassuming as only someone with no sense of self can be. Once aboard the Green Diva, he falls in line with the Captain’s opinion of being nothing more than an inconvenience. When being sent off the ship on a makeshift raft, Abani feels no anger or resentment. Instead, he is grateful that the members of the crew, busy men of the world, had concentrated all their attention on constructing a raft exclusively for him. At the other end of the spectrum is Basant Kumar Bal, whose heinous act of murder is inspired by a build-up of daily resentment and an all-too-clear sense of his class identity. Alarmingly free of guilt, Bal sleeps through the ominous sound of the trapdoor on death row shutting noisily with every execution, reminding the prisoners of their impending fate. The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian also gives us Madhusudan Sen, the ICS Sub Divisional Magistrate of Batia. Quintessential brown babu who needs his eggs and sausages, liver, toast, fruit and tea, irrespective of the culinary limitations of the town he has been posted to, Madhusudan is a bit of an Easter egg for the involved reader, being the father of Agastya Sen of Chatterjee’s English, August; feted, in the author’s debut novel, for his successful ascent up the ladder of bureaucracy.

The stories of The Hush exist in the liminal space between fact and fiction, drawing on historical events and cultural references, rooting themselves in social and political reality. Whether it is Calcutta of the 1970s or Patiala of the 1960s, or a small town in newly independent India, or a fictional princely state with a fictional king (who might/might not be modelled on Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda), the narrative captures the milieu with an impressive attention to detail. Prem is invited to a matinee show of the hit Vyjayanthimala and Dilip Kumar starrer, Madhumati, and the reader is treated to the vicarious joy of the theatre experience at a time when the big screen was still a novelty, and cinema had the capacity to enthral its audience. Batia, in The Revenge, is a generic provincial space, with its Magistrate’s Bungalow in Civil Lines and its Company Bagh, and its reputation as a temple town that frowns on the consumption of meat. In a statement undeniably resonant with our intolerant times, Madhusudan Sen avers: “It is not quite clear to me, the link between the carnivore and the love of slaughter. One thinks, you know, of the horrors inflicted on Europe and the world in the last decade by a vegetarian.” He is speaking, of course, of the Holocaust and Hitler but the relevance to the policing of food and the apparent validation of it by the masses is hard to miss.

The role of fiction as a truth-teller in a post-truth world is obvious in The Hapless Prince. In the clearest rendition of the Empire striking back, Hariram berates Wharton- the British Resident at Bhawanipur and, in a quirk of coincidence, also his childhood friend from England- for the racism he was subject to at their uppity school. He was called names even as he was considered part of the “Inner Circle”. “I felt – I was – an outcast in the midst of a group of boisterous and violent dimwits”, he says. Charles Hamilton’s portrayal of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh (as also subsequent representations of Indian characters in the popular culture of the Global North) comes in for a fair bit of criticism when Hariram comments on the Indian accent he had cultivated for his British peers: “I demeaned myself, spoke the language like an Indian blockhead, left my brains behind in a jewel-box with my retainers in Maidstone.” The immigrant making himself smaller to fit in is a pattern that continues unbroken. Hariram also challenges the rapacity of the empire. “…you continue to take away our tea, cotton and jute”, he tells Wharton; “in return you give us the wisdom of Macaulay. It is our wealth that funds your railways, shipping and textiles, and supports Churchill’s waxing girth and waning sense.” At the same time, he continues to, unironically, enjoy the excesses of the royal family- bejewelled bespoke items, ranging from cigarette cases and lapis lazuli ashtrays to clothing, polo matches at Jaipur and tennis at Simla, eccentricities like indoor cycles, and luxuries like a personal railway carriage. The fractured world of these novellas offers no unqualified heroism.

Since English, August (1988), Chatterjee has been telling of conflicts – whether turned inward or centred in the outside world. In The Hush, Abani’s fight is not with the titular uncaring sea, but with the sense of worthlessness and isolation he allows other people to settle on him. The Revenge is as much about Bal’s disavowal of the limitations of his class identity as it is about the repugnance of violence. In The Stink of Red Herring, Prem’s investigation of the crime pits him against the faux solidity of socio-cultural spaces that value community over the individual. There is also, almost reassuringly, the age-old father-son conflict that spills over into The Hapless Prince. Overarchingly, these narratives represent, across their varied temporal realities, the conflict between passivity and agency. Together, they speak truth to power. Lives are not expendable. Oppression never goes unchallenged. Violence engenders more violence. With characteristic sharp humour, this quartet of novellas does what Upamanyu Chatterjee’s fiction is best known for – scolding the reader into critical thinking, and amplifying the voices of the silenced.

The Hush Of The Uncaring Sea: Novellas (2018–2025), Upamanyu Chatterjee, Speaking Tiger Books.