Ramanujan

In these poems, written after the death of his parents, Amit Chaudhuri gives us both a record of loss and an account of tasting life afresh. Here, past and future are often conjoined, as are moments, people, and sounds: Ramanujan the mathematician and Chaudhuri, related as much by Cambridge as they are to each other by their suffering bodies; absent parents echoed by the daughter absent during home-cooked meals; a 9th-century Chinese poet and Sybille Bedford finding a reader in Chaudhuri, who himself addresses a 'Reader' who belongs to both past and future; the first day of the year with its 'cough cough' rhythm echoed by the 'tatak tatak' of the dhak on Durga puja; two mothers, one American, in Kaddish, the other an Indian maid with a face disfigured by burns; the 'human and God touching faces nose to nose'. Moving through this world - Chaudhuri's universe - now annotated by bereavement, one cannot not be infected, again, by the wonder and newness with which he experiences the world: that, even after living and all these lives, 'I never felt I knew the place'. "The spirit of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, a "strange misfit" in Cambridge, hovers over this mercurial collection that dwells deftly on empire and migration, on the solidity of architecture and the fugitive particularity of food. All of it testifies to an "appetite for existence" and an omnivorous richness of perception." - Jamie McKendrick