Research Chronicler: International Multidisciplinary Refereed Peer Reviewed Indexed Research Journal ISSN: Print: 2347-5021 www.research-chronicler.com ISSN: Online: 2347-503X

An Excavation of the Orifices of Indian Society: A Study of Upamanyu’s Way to Go Dr. Md. Irshad Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Government Engineering College, Madhubani, (Bihar) India

Abstract Upamanyu Chatterjee highlights the realistic picture of Indian society in Way to Go. The novel presents a dismal picture of life. It describes the unhappy story of an equally unhappy family. The most outstanding themes of the present novel are death, old age and tedium. Chatterjee presents his idealism and his stark protest in a mask of black humour. Key Words: Idealism, Life, Protest, Realism, Society

All human things are subject to decay Full name and address!’ Jamun gave them …………. When fate summons Monarch must obey A full description of the missing Mac Flacknoe, Dryden person?’ ……. Your relationship with missing Upamanyu Chatterjee’s brilliant novel, Way person? to Go is an excavation of the orifices of He is my son. I am his father. Damn Indian society. It continues the unhappy I mean, he is my father. I am his son story of an equally unhappy family of The ……… The profession of missing Last Burden. The underbelly of modern person? India is presented very vividly by He retired from government service Upamanyu. more than Way to Go opens with a scene that is twenty five years ago. strongly reminiscent of English August: An Any hobby, passion or interest of Indian story of Upamanyu. Jamun, the missing person?..… protagonist of Way to Go is genteel, lazy, Missing person was Male or Female? selfish, struggling with words, fantasizing ‘Male’ about death, and branded loser. He goes to ‘He had any love Relationship with the police station to report his father’s anybody?’ disappearance Shyamananda, a semi- ‘No’ paralysed old man. In the constable’s room Any quarrel, dispute, any enmity with with its “glum blue walls, was tubelit…. a anyone? (P.5-9) doorway without a door,1 Jamun has to give Way to Go is obviously a universal protest the detail and comprehensive information of against the human condition. Chatterjee the routine inquiry. presents a protest and idealism very vividly ….. Tell me. Name? here. Simply it seems that the novel shows Mine? Or my father’s? My father’s, that death is all around and our life is Shyamanand’ corrupting and filled with disappointments.

Volume VIII Issue VII: November 2020 (40) Author: Dr. Md. Irshad Research Chronicler: International Multidisciplinary Refereed Peer Reviewed Indexed Research Journal ISSN: Print: 2347-5021 www.research-chronicler.com ISSN: Online: 2347-503X Most people live lives of desperation, love suicide and another dies of natural causes. and sex have nothing to offer, most ‘On new year’s day, in the morning, relationship are failed ones; we are all neighbour Ganguly died’. (P.261.) But the rotting corpses on our way to the morgue. focus of the story is unexplained Life presents a dismal picture. The novel disappearances rather than plain old starts with the unpromisingly clumsy mortality. There are three unexplained question- “For not having one’s dead father absences, starting with the boys’85 years – enough, could one make amends by loving old father, Shyamanand. He was partially one’s child more?” – and proceeds to fail to paralysed by a stroke twenty years ago and answer the question for the next 350-odd can scarcely hobble around the house, leave pages. We are reminded here the writers like alone run away from it. Nevertheless, he Kingsley, Soul Bellow, Hanif Kureishi, vanishes without a trace one day and, after DBC Pierre and others for demonstrating the some weeks, so does the neighbour, Naina similar theme. Kapur. The sense of helplessness is also cited in ‘Missing person’s full name and English August. M. Hemalatha observes: address?’ The protagonist’s later life shows the ‘Naina Kapur. Mrs. The addresss you vacuum created by his mother’s early know.’(p.135) demise-a sense of insecurity, being Finally, Jamun himself succumbs to closed-up, for an outlet’s emotions, banishment, leaving his brother to perform critical outlook towards life and sense the laborious task of filling out yet another of non-belonging2 missing person form at the local police Jamun simply lacks the energy to jump up station. and start screaming at his sawdust-brained In a country of billion people, Jamun interrogator the way most of us would. had mused on his way home in an auto Instead, he glaze-eyedly observes the things rickshaw driven by a scruffy type happening around him, such as the wasp and bright-eyed with Cocaine; it was easy the tea-boy entering the room at the same to disappear… time. Eventually he is in a near-comatoze That was how Shyamanand must have state, reading off dimly remembered gone, that was how Jamun wanted to sentences that he heard someone else say in go. Then there were others------a similar situation. Mukherjee the chemist, the forsaken Jamun leads a life of quiet resignation and Naina Kapur. (P.231) depression. He has an elder brother, Burfi, Without doubt, the novel is about the who went to jail for battering his wife. humdrum atrocities with which the cloth of Jamun was absolutely unable to continue his modern India is woven. The helplessness of relationship with Kasturi, the mother of his Jamun is noticed here: child. My insomnia therefore, Jamun told Death and departure are the theme of this himself repeatedly night upon night novel. One of the neighbours commits for weeks after his father’s Volume VIII Issue VII: November 2020 (41) Author: Dr. Md. Irshad Research Chronicler: International Multidisciplinary Refereed Peer Reviewed Indexed Research Journal ISSN: Print: 2347-5021 www.research-chronicler.com ISSN: Online: 2347-503X disappearance, doesn’t surprise me in their small belong about their favourite topic the least. It in fact would worry me – death. terribly if I slept well because that Furthermore, Madhumati was bewildered means I had nothing to worry about, when she came to know that Jamun and as though at was well. (P 163) Burfi didn’t even know the names of their The exploration and excavation of the maternal grandparents and their paternal orifices of Indian society are going on in the grandmother. whole novel. Jamun and Barfi belong to is a ‘Well, there are some relatives we’ve world of tedium, despair, and violence. A never met, defensively elaborated tenant renders a building untenable by Jamun to Madhumati, and some we committing suicide within its premises, the haven’t seen in forty years. (p. 187) presumption that is ghost will be a co- squatter dissuades most prospective tenants. Relationships can be sustained and Lobesh Monga, the builder, stands for the developed only through mutual vicious, corrupt, nonstop energy of the new understanding and patience. Family India shining. And Jamun’s former life is disruption is also noticed here. In short, presented by his wife’s TV serial, cheers Upamanyu Chatterjee, like Webster in Zindagi. Eliot’s poem, does seem “much possessed by death”. The novel Way to Go is a Death, old age and tedium constitute the universal protest against the human most powerful themes of the novel. condition, And old age is but a paltry thing No one escaped from life. (p. 312) A tattered coat upon a bamboo stick …… Defecation, death and sex merge into one another in the jumble of Jamun’s thoughts as The sudden disappearance of Shyamananda he ponders the meaning of the filial bond makes Jamun nervous: and family ties. So ever since Shyamanad’s Unpleasant occasion- the death of a disappearance Jamun startled each loved one, for instance, always more time by the ringing of the gate bell, unbearable than one’s own---were just had gone with a rapidly beating heart those incidents and accidents that one to check who it was, thinking on each had neither anticipated nor bargained occasion that the father---prodigal in for. (P.127) his irresponsibility, his toughness-the father after having been buffeted Again the trouble of Jamun goes on: about a good bit by the slings and The more the time passes, the more arrows, had at last returned home. depressed you become (P.126)…. True. And the more you dream of The relationship between father and son in killing yourself. (P.69) various hues of human emotions is vivid in Furthermore, the conversation suggests the the episodes where Jamun and Shyamanand crisis of Jamun: can be heard chatting the evenings away in Volume VIII Issue VII: November 2020 (42) Author: Dr. Md. Irshad Research Chronicler: International Multidisciplinary Refereed Peer Reviewed Indexed Research Journal ISSN: Print: 2347-5021 www.research-chronicler.com ISSN: Online: 2347-503X Your father might have gone abroad, Chatterjee does seem to be more in you know. love with easeful death than life. Don’t be silly. Where? Jamun’s ruminations on suicide have a lively quality that no paeans to life can I don’t know. He always wanted to. quite match. The progression from Paris? death to life is written into the novel’s Don’t be silly. How? He doesn’t even structure, which repeats and have a passport. substitutes endings with beginnings. (P.116) Yet the narrative pull is undeniably The mental agony of the protagonist is vivid backwards, towards the drowsy in the following lines: numbness promised by hash, and finally, by death.3 Every day in his wonderings, Jamun saw a dozen old men who resembled Jamun’s restlessness continues towards the end of the novel: his father; when with thudding heart he approached them, they The father was never seen again by his metamorphosed into a seller of Vedic sons. aphrodisiacs, or an insurance clerk ‘Is he dead’? Had demanded Jamun of who doubled as a homoeopath in his his crotchety manager of Ma Durga off-duty hours, or a yogi in search of a Pure Vegetarian Lodge and Final Rest fan following. Every day in his Home Cash Only Credit Please. ‘Can I wanderings he saw a dozen old stop searching’? He couldn’t, He women who resembled his mother, he didn’t, for not for a time because truly needed to be drugged, he felt, to several others had seen him…………. maintain equilibrium, to enjoy in those Indeed seemed to see him everyday. bylaws the hallucinatory effects of his (P.355 – 356) intoxication. To conclude, we can say that Way to Go Shyamanand was dead. Gone (P.357) presents very vividly the realistic picture of Anusua Mukherjee observes: life. Individual conflicts have been pin pointed here very keenly. Works Cited: 1. Chatterjee, Upamanyu: Way To Go, Penguin Books , New Delhi, 2010, p.4 (All further citations are to this edition and the page numbers are given at the end of the quotations in parentheses) 2. Hemalatha, M, Cultural Crisis in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English August: An Indian Story, Punya Bhoomi, Vol. I, No.1, Jan,2010, p.79 3. Mukherjee, Anusua, Much possessed by Death, Way To Go by Upamanyu Chatterjee, The Telegraph, Calcutta, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100430/jsp/opinion/story. (3 June 2010)

Volume VIII Issue VII: November 2020 (43) Author: Dr. Md. Irshad