The ‘City of Love’ is set in the 16th Century (1510), and the story largely takes place in the undivided Bengal of those years.

Those were turbulent times— most of India was in turmoil with the Mughals striving hard to gain supremacy over native sultans and Rajas. The Portuguese had also arrived. This book is set about 50 years after Vasco da Gama successfully landed at Calicut, bringing in his wake Europeans hungering to carve out territories in India. While the Mughals were striving to establish their empire, the Europeans were using force and cunning in order to get their share of the lucrative spice trade.

The novel is set in Chittagong, the teeming port town of those years, and later in Gaur, the capital of 16th Century Bengal. Chittagong was swarming with traders, pirates, sailors, slave-traders, slaves and ordinary people displaced by the advent of religions like Islam and Christianity.

The book captures this atmosphere in a vivid manner, and one can almost see the port city crowded with people from Malacca, Malaya, Burma, Java, Portugal, Arabia— every imaginable nation, in fact, that was sea-faring in those times.

Into this maelstrom of history are hurled the four protagonists in the story— Fernando Almenara ( “…a Castilian by birth, a Florentine by adoption, trading under the Portuguese flag…”), Bajja (the vulgarised form of the actual word Vajra)— a young tribal girl, Chandu (later called Kalu)— the son of a Brahmin priest and Daud Suleiman al-Basri— a Moorish pirate who ends up meddling with the politics of India.

The book starts off in a most promising manner with the author deftly putting into place the atmosphere and characters with plenty of historical references. This helps greatly in transporting one back to the era when adventurers roamed the world in various garbs.

The writing style is direct and rich in imagery and very flowing, with hardly any road-bumps. The characters grow as the pages flip by, and indeed, there is a veritable procession of people who flit in and about the four main ones. Pirates and poets, Christian and Brahmin priests, Sufis and tantrics, sultans and nawabs, Sher Shah and Humayun, all fit into a rich tapestry that manages to capture those chaotic times.

The friendship between Chandu, the Shaiva Brahmin priest’s son and the tribal girl, Bajja, is heart-breakingly wonderful. As the story unfolds, the quest for enlightenment, power and riches sets the agenda for the journey that each of the four characters undertake. For me personally, the pace slackened when the author goes a little too deeply into the details of tantra. But there is no rule to say a book needs to keep travelling at a brisk pace. If you treat it like an unhurried journey, with its pauses, discussions, night halts, then the book works very well.

Explaining myths

Many little known Indian myths and legends have been written about and several of them were eye-openers, like for instance the legend of how the Shiva lingam came into existence as an object of veneration. There is also a strong vein of Sufism emerging through, and the author does well to bring out the universal appeal of such a mystic faith that has no religious boundaries.

I personally feel the author had gathered up all her writing skills for the beginning and concluding portions of the book, for it begins and ends on such a superlative note. This is not to say that the middle portions are not written well— it is just that there is such a noticeable change of pace and diction at the opening and closing.

The City of Love is Rimi B Chatterji’s third book and her second novel after Signal Red. She is already reported to be working on her next novel, ‘Flip!’ Judging by this richly written novel, it certainly whets the appetite for more.

The City of Love,  Rimi B.Chatterji; Penguin Books India, 2007;
pp 321; Rs.295  
646 words