Upamanyu Chatterjee’s prose has a lulling effect like the hypnotic thrashing of waves, high tide, low tide, the relieving numbness of foamy waters beating against rocks. It’s unsurprising that in his collection of four novellas, the title piece sets its protagonist afloat on the high seas. The young adult is flung overboard by a ruthless ship Captain, for merely oversleeping and lingering on the vessel when it set sail.

But Chatterjee’s soothing sentences are not stitched into placid narratives. Keenly attuned to the vagaries of his characters, he leads us through their whims and machinations, from the innocuous to the life-altering or the other way around. In “The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian,” we hurtle from a startlingly violent scene to the contents of a civil servant’s tiffin box; in “The Stink of a Red Herring” from a typical father-son quarrel to a murdered three-year-old. All this is recounted with a composure and knowing twinkle, bringing to the fore our nation’s quirky ways of being.

In “The Hush of the Uncaring Sea”, the hapless Abani is locked into a linen room. Dozing through the ship’s lurching start, he infuriates his relative who works in the kitchen and who brought him on board for a ship tour. The cook, who now has to report this to the captain, decides to delay the news: “Bother a firangi with two headaches together and he implodes.” He’s right. Except that the Captain doesn’t implode, but calmly solves the problem with what might feel like an unserious suggestion. Surely, he doesn’t really intend to throw the interloper overboard?

Except, that he does. After all, as he puts it, the ship is a well-oiled enterprise with its own rules: “On the high seas, in fair weather, life on board ship tends to be sedate and regulated.” A stowaway would require them to dock the ship and engage in tedious confabulations with foreign police. All of which would delay their shipments and enrage their company. It’s capitalist logic versus a man’s life, a historic tradeoff that has never been weighted in favor of aggravating humans.

Displaying a flippant concern for his survival, the Captain considers dispatching him in a barrel, then opts for a raft that he has his men cobble together. Before he can wrap his mind around what’s befallen him, Abani finds himself in a Life-of-Piesque scenario, lowered with ropes on a precarious float. Around him, the uncaring sea heaves: “They kill, the sun and open air and sticky humidity, they are so essential to life but they just as indubitably kill; moreover, they do in nice easy stages because time is on their side.”

Inside the ship, the villainous Captain has become strangely kinder. Fortunately, there seems to be a fallout. The ship is ordered to berth at Durban and he’s accused of manslaughter. But he escapes, absconding with money from the ship’s safe.

Abani had been picked up by another ship. Eventually when he returns to his tenuous earlier life, he yearns for the sea, for its soporific sounds. The sea becomes a stand-in for an emotional void: “I need to go. When I was all alone out there, it was the sea that took care of me.”

In “The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarians,” Basant Kumar Bal bludgeons his employers – a Muslim family of six members – to death. Then burns their bodies and house, reducing everything to a charred hole. The next day, the Dalvis were to celebrate their daughter’s engagement, but that milestone was tossed to the flames.

It was an era when bonded labor was a thing. Perhaps Basant Kumar harbored a seething resentment of folks who seemed to have too much to eat. He especially craved their succulent meats, which he too had an affection for: “The Dalvis liked to eat, he stated. And they liked the others under their roof to feel want.”

This is India in the 1940s. Certain areas, proximal to particular temples, have been demarcated as “vegetarian”, compelling its meat-loving civil servant – Madhusudhan Sen, the Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Batia – to discretely procure his non-veg tiffin boxes from the Dalvis. Nadeem Dalvi had been his subordinate in the office. His family’s horrific murder feels intensely personal. Sen wants to ensure that the perpetrator is hung to death.

After Basant Kumar Bal is jailed, Sen visits an abattoir: “The cement floor of the shed was slippery with excrement, blood, offal and gore. Inside, it hit them like a hard slap on the head, the din of the animal world giving voice to its terror – the mooing of cattle sensing slaughter, the bleating of goats about to have their limbs broken and their blood drained out of gashes in their throats, hens in cages, clucking in frenzy seconds before being pulled out and beheaded.”

The Magistrate turns vegetarian but this does not dampen his zeal for Basant Kumar’s violent end. Clearly vegetarianism and non-violence are not algebraic equivalents. Sen learns that Hitler was a vegetarian, or that a diet-conscious temple priest supports the death penalty. Towards the end, the killer receives a Presidential reprieve from his sentence. Madhusudhan conceals the telex message.

Chatterjee’s stories drive us into a rabbit-hole of never-ending questions. Is it moral to kill animals (and insects), but not human beings? Is turning vegetarian more righteous than banning capital punishment? They’re also punctuated with his trademark humor. For instance, in “The Stink of the Red Herring”, the US-returned protagonist wants to become a detective rather than an engineer. His uncle tries to talk him out of it, then gives in with an exasperated: “It isn’t the first time in the world that a young donkey has proceeded to make an ass of himself.”

When the same detective visits a post office to examine a post mark, he notes: “In any government establishment, the counter that is manned but customer-less, is being shunned by the public for a reason; it is a sign that dealing with the clerk behind it could, in a matter of minutes, take years off your life. Indeed, the reader of the Hind Samachar did not like being disturbed at work with work.” This is exactly the kind of book that employees can bury their noses in, not just to shirk work, but also to derive a peculiar pleasure.

References

Upamanyu Chatterjee, The Hush of the Uncaring Sea: Novellas (2018-2025), Speaking Tiger, 2025