And Where My Friend Lay You Hiding

A chance encounter on a train sparks an unlikely friendship between Shonjoy and Anjan Prasad. While Shonjoy is the English-speaking son of a cultured and well-to-do Bengali family in Allahabad, Anjan is a small-towner from unfashionable Mirpur, whose manner betrays his simple breeding. But they both share an interest in books, and, like all intellectuals in Allahabad in the 1950s, become enthusiastic habitués of the famed India Coffee House sanctuary for pretenders and writers where they try to best each other’s writing efforts. Then Shonjoy cops out. Lured by the promises of the big city, he moves to Calcutta and the world of advertising, whilst Anjan, resolute in his wish to be a writer in the true sense, travels only to the depths to which his Muse beckons him…

And where, my friend, lay you hiding? by Ananda Mukerji is a quiet work of lyricism and insight. Elegant, nuanced and written in crystalline prose, it is the story of an dealistic writer who knows he must break free from the love of his wife and children, the comfort of the straight and narrow, and experience life at its most raw, if he is to achieve greatness in his art; and his friend who cannot forgive him for deserting the woman he is half in love with himself, and for being the writer he can never be.