Upamanyu Chatterjee’s latest novel deftly explores the fluidity of human experience and the ever-shifting nature of life’s purpose
The rather longish title of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s latest novel, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, holds the key to the way the book unfolds. Search is a never-ending, ever-evolving process and the meaning of life is shifty and slippery at best. This is what Lorenzo, the protagonist of the book, finds as he undertakes journeys — physical and spiritual — to come to terms with his life and times and their ever-shifting imperatives.
In fact, journey — a small but beautiful word — is the underlying leitmotif of the book. At one level, this journey is intensely personal. Lorenzo — after a terrible accident and lying supine in bed — toys with the idea of seeking the meaning of his life. This takes him to a Benedictine monastery in Praglia where permanent vows of monkhood follow his temporary and tentative exploration of the modus vivendi of a life lived mostly in silence, adhering to discipline, lived with austerity and spent in reflection and contemplation.
Lorenzo promises to adhere to the four vows — stability, poverty, fidelity to the monastic way, and obedience to the rule. But his seeming sense of permanence is temporary at best as he undertakes a trans-continental journey to Bangladesh to join a small mission in Khulna district. More meanings lurk in the offing and his search must begin anew which would put to severe test each of his four vows.
The elusive singular meaning
This trans-continental journey from Italy to Bangladesh has its shares of trials and tribulations. Black cassock gives way to ‘lungi’ and here starts the next part of his journey. The Praglia experience was mostly predictable and defined; it offered little leeway for exploration and experimentation. But Bangladesh, with its bewildering range of human variety, stark poverty, and sickening pathologies of existence, would test him in unpredictable and challenging ways.
And, there, he realises that life has to be lived not merely as part of the religious community but by coming to terms with problems of the human community. It is the reason he turns his back on the mission at Khulna and joins his compatriots in Bangladesh — who, at Rishilpi, are busy with more pressing questions of economic and social renewal. Almost predictably, microcredit is an important component of the venture and it is where Lorenzo puts his knowledge of Physiotherapy to good use. This journey from the confines of a religious community to the challenges of social community widens Lorenzo’s horizons.
But as with all journeys, Chatterjee underlines the absence of linearity. For Lorenzo, his journeys are not straightforward affairs. There are retreats, there are revisions and there are deviations from the script. In the process, he discovers that insularity of a regimented existence as at Praglia monastery sits at odds with the world as it is, with its turmoil and chaos and one must try to do — howsoever and whatever little — to alleviate the woes of the suffering humanity while remaining invested in society.
So when he asks the church to free him from the allegiance of permanent vows, he is seeking to go back to where it had all begun — family. He will marry Dipa, a Bangladeshi catholic, will raise children and will become a hands-on parent. A man of the world but not forgetting the Benedictine tenets — service to humanity with humility. Steeped less in rituals but possibly more in spirituality, his journey begins on a new note, with new meanings beckoning him. The search for the meaning, one defining meaning will remain incomplete as life doesn’t lend itself to just one meaning.
Investing meanings in the mundane
The first part of the book, which deals with Lorenzo’s tryst with religion at Praglia, is largely textual. Chatterjee relies upon the texts of Christianity to dwell on Lorenzo’s journey and quotes generously from them to describe the trajectory of his journey. So this part of the book is rather austere. The book comes alive in the second part with Lorenzo moving to Bangladesh. Here, Chatterjee is on a surer footing, his terra firma, and displays his ease with the topophilia of Bangladesh.
However hard he might try to dispense with his trademark humour, it makes its presence felt — although only fleetingly before more serious issues command his attention. His attention to details is microscopic: “The legs of each item of furniture, Lorenzo notices, stand in earthen bowls that are filled to the brim with water. It is not God’s ways alone, says Lorenzo to himself, that are mysterious.”
The book must be read for a number of considerations. Firstly, it is quite different from what Chatterjee is generally known for. Second, he does not subscribe to the false Occident-Orient binary. There could be differences but human problems, human scale and human dimension overlap in significant ways. Third, it shows that the meanings that we seek are invariably ad hoc and intermediate and they keep changing.
Lastly, because it underlines that one must keep searching — something that Gandhi would call ‘My Experiments with Truth’. Self-actualisation is not one final goal. As new circumstances emerge, horizons change and the idea of self-actualisation takes a different meaning altogether. Lorenzo’s capacity for renewal by investing meanings in the mundane is almost surreal.
