Mid-way into Day Scholar,the narrator,an aspiring writer from Kadam Kuan,Patna,and student of English honours in a college in Delhi University (DU),talks about the stories he wishes to write: stories that I and my friends could read about places and things I knew,in a simple matter-of-fact manner. Concrete specificity and not long-winded waffle. That,in author Siddharth Chowdhurys own words,is the sum of his style. It is a distinctive voice,one that held our attention in Patna Roughcut (2005),a collection of stories set in Patna. One that evokes the particularity of a place,its graininess and colour and the ribald laughter on its street corners,not through the decorative description that often clogs Indian novels but through sharp characters and sharper dialogue. In Day Scholar,Chowdhury tips his hat to one of the subcultures of contemporary Delhi that ,surprisingly,has not yet been mined for stories North Campus,DU. Hriday Thakur drifts in there from a listless academic career in Patna,in search of direction,and material for his fiction. At Shokeen Niwas,where he puts up (in a room where a woman was burnt to death and which still smells of flesh,bone and fear),he finds plenty of the latter. The niwas is owned by Zorawar Singh Shokeen,a strapping half-Jat half-Gujjar property dealer,who has many uses for the capitals politicians. In the easy amorality of the house,its chanciness,its far remove from respectability,Hriday settles in quite comfortably. He stakes out this turf for stories and every character he meets has a story to tell. Proud Bhumihar Jishnu Sharma,in Tweety Pie shorts and Sandow ganji,whose room is filled with civil services guides and ready reckoners,but whose real skill,as befits Shokeens lackey,is in carving up the face of a man with a sharp astura. Satyabrat Ojha,a Masters in Sanskrit from St. Stephens,one of the many danasurs on the margins of the campus who arrived in DU to clear the civils and never went back. Or Shokeen,who committed his first murder at 25 and who screams Jai Mata Di on the brink of an orgasm. With Hriday,you could be at an adda on Chhatra Marg,a khamba of Old Monk rum (Regular Use Medicine) being shared with friends,listening in on the yarns of colourful strangers. Except that you wonder,less often than Hriday does,where the plot is heading. Chowdhury also keeps the much-mythologised twin Brahmins of DU,St Stephens and Hindu,at a far remove. It is the ecosystem that has grown around it Mukherjee Nagar,Vijay Nagar double-storey,Dhaka,Model Town,Indira Vihar,Kamla Nagar that is the setting of Day Scholar. The author doesnt describe these places so much as string them together into an incantation. But while the language of Patna Roughcut allowed for nuance even in its austerity,here the prose sags,in need of an editors astura,and rarely rises to quiet moments of revelation. There can be such a thing as too matter-of-fact. What you get are vignettes of DU both funny and grim,but they just seem to skim the surface and characters that are more quirky cameos than people with tragic potential (there is no equivalent of Patna Roughcuts Harryda here) or moral complexity. The only time we inhabit Hridays mind and life fully,see him as something more than a drifter looking out at the world,is when he writes about the redemptive ritual of writing. The plot and Hriday,with particular Patna slowness,move into action only on Page 150. In a novella of 160-odd pages,that is a narrow arc to cover. This is a readable book,enjoyable even,but ultimately insubstantial.
