In 1988, Upamanyu Chatterjee gave his Indian reader English, August, a coming-of-age story that was also a sharp critique of Indian bureaucracy and commentary on the unbridgeable divide between those who held privilege in urban India and those that they attempted to govern in the rural hinterland. He also gave us Agastya Sen, 24 years old, newly appointed to the Indian Administrative Service and entirely removed from the realities of the provincial town he was posted to. English, August was a realistic (if acerbic) portrait of India in the ‘80s and its protagonist was the quintessential outsider, aware of his difference and distance from the people and the milieu surrounding him.
In his latest book, which, in Chatterjee’s own words, is a true story that is a work of fiction, we have yet another protagonist who is an outsider and is acutely conscious of it. The world of Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life is a radical departure from the author’s previous work. Instead of dark humour and generous lashings of cynicism, the narrative situates itself in the stability of faith. It tells the story of Lorenzo Bonifacio, a resident of Aquilinia, Italy, who, at age 21, embarks on a spiritual quest with a visit to the Praglia Abbey, consequently choosing monkhood and a life of service as a Benedictine. Based on the life of Fabrizio Senesi, a friend of the author, the book occupies that undefinable space between fiction and non-fiction – part novel, part biography – entirely irreverent of the confines of genre.
The potential of freedom
Lorenzo’s story starts in Italy, in the December of 1980. Having met with an accident at age 19 and survived miraculously, Lorenzo wonders, in his moments of existential crises, “where he had come from, where he was going and how to find out more about where he ought to go.” Armed only with a book by Carlo Carretto, an Italian writer and mystic, Lorenzo leaves home for the abbey, finding, eventually, a space within the cloister. At the abbey, Lorenzo is introduced to rigorous order, the day divided between ora et labora, prayer and physical labour. Four years into this life, he takes the vows of stability, poverty, fidelity to the monastic way and obedience to the Rule of the Benedictine, imagining these to be inviolable and rigid. Instead, the course of his journey teaches him to constantly re-interpret the supposedly set-in-stone, to keep the essence and contextualise everything else. Some of Chatterjee’s inherent cynicism seeps into the text when Lorenzo realises that money is “not a dirty word, even for those who have vowed to remain utterly and absolutely poor; indeed, money is essential in the matter of keeping body and soul together so as to enable them to practise their pauperdom.”
Lorenzo’s search for meaning takes him to a hermitage where he discovers the potential of freedom in meditative solitude. It is in this state of solitude that he mulls over two kinds of monastic life- eremitic, which emphasises the solitary nature of the monk’s life, and coenobitic, which pulls him into community life. This balance between loving god and humankind comes to define much of Lorenzo’s choices in life, taking him seven thousand kilometres away, to Bangladesh, to a small monastery, newly declared a dependent of the Praglia Abbey. Lorenzo’s journey to a village in the Khulna district of Bangladesh, via the heterogeneity of London (where he spends eight months polishing his English-speaking skills and learning a rudimentary Bangla), teaches him the meaninglessness of frontiers. They exist only for the purposes of war so that men who wield power might have continued opportunities to flex it, he concludes.
Bangladesh, from the moment of his arrival into its noise and smells, its chaos, its crowd and its “bewildering variety of colours”, makes Lorenzo aware of his outsider status. Similar to Agastya in his incomprehension of this new space, Lorenzo is worlds removed from him in his desire to understand, assimilate, and make himself useful. It is entirely to Chatterjee’s credit that the white man in a very brown country navigates it with humility and wonder, never quite falling into either caricature or cinematic bombast. Lorenzo’s search for meaning and his search for God takes interesting trajectories in this new land that seems to have adopted him as much as he has adopted it, bringing him to the realisation that it may be possible to carry within himself, everything he needs for the spiritual life, and it might, therefore, be possible to reject the symbolic externals of religion.
Home in the world
There is a quaintness to the book, a quality never before associated with Upamanyu Chatterjee’s writing. Lorenzo learns his religion and his particular religiosity through unusual means. He finds lessons in Dostoyevsky (after having rubbished all fiction as devoid of enlightenment). His compulsion to “stay the course” makes him complete a course in Physiotherapy as well as a diploma in Fine Arts, both of which serve their purpose in the life he chooses in Bangladesh. From his engagement with Renaissance art and Byzantine iconography, he turns to tempera, an ancient technique where dry pigment is tempered with egg yolk, making for long-lasting paintings, in an incredibly labour-intensive and time-consuming process. Tempera was also a technique used by artists of the Bengal school in the early years of the 20th century and Lorenzo’s bringing of this form to Khulna, integrating it with locally sourced materials, bears the delectable symmetry of syncretism. His Theotokos, a portrait of Mary with Jesus, depicts a dark-skinned mother and child, their expressions evocative of hope instead of suffering. The artist’s vision is perhaps a corollary to his mentor’s project of translating the Bible into Bangla to make scripture accessible to all who want to engage with it, breaking down the barrier of otherness. The simplicity of Lorenzo’s desire is endearing, another trait one does not usually associate with Chatterjee’s misfits.
Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life is an unusual book. It has an unlikely protagonist, and a staggered journey from a small town in Italy to a nine-hundred years old religious institution, to the busy urbanity of London in the 1990s, to the complexities of a small town in a country still shaping its identity. It is scaffolded with markers of world history in the 1980s and 90s – the tragedy of Chernobyl, the Gulf War, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer, the dissolution of the USSR, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and its repercussions across borders.
It works because of its detailed research into monastic life in the Benedictine order, but also because it subverts reader expectations, and tells the extraordinary story of an ordinary man. It turns into a surprisingly accurate exposition of Heidegger’s dasein – the German word for existence, meaning the nature of being of human beings, of being in time, of experiencing an inner world and finding expression in an outer one. “Only a human being tries to examine the nature of being,” Chatterjee writes. “A human being is a being-unto-death and it is thus that temporality and destiny become the fundamental features of his world, and thus that time as lived, existential time, becomes the measure of man.”
Lorenzo’s search becomes the search for authenticity, for being “useful” in the time that he occupies, and for making a difference. It is also a search for freedom. Lorenzo finds his freedom in his version of the coenobitic, in becoming part of a community, and as the author tells us, in living his life anti-clockwise. How, is what the reader will need to see for themselves.
Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Speaking Tiger Books.