Real Time: stories and a memoir by Amit Chaudhuri

An intimate portrait of India's social climbers

In this first collection of short stories from Amit Chaudhuri, the respected Calcutta-based author of Afternoon Raag and Freedom Song, groups and cultures rub each other up to form an aspiring Indian "middle-middle-class" some time between the Seventies and the present day. Together, the 15 stories (along with a two-part verse memoir) make for an intimate read. Often mere snatches of life from the upper rungs of Bombay and Calcutta society, Chaudhuri's tales offer titbits of the author's early experience.

Set during the regime of Indira Gandhi, "The Party" tells of Mr Gupta's eagerness to climb those rungs. His company boss, Mr Sinha-Roy (promoted to head of finance), is throwing a party before moving, family in tow, to a larger flat – so that he can throw larger parties. Gupta and his wife, keen to impress, arrive ahead of other guests. After all, the party is "a serious business", and the path to success leads through the Sinha-Roys' son, Amal.

At around nine, Mr Gupta finds himself close to the boy's room. Fearful, Gupta enters on command, his request for an audience with "the beast, or god, or mystery, the company's inmost secret" granted. "How are you, young man?" ventures the Assistant Company Secretary, only to flinch nervously when his eyes meet Amal's. These are the eyes that "invisibly, ruled and governed his boss's life". They are interrupted by another guest wishing to siphon off some of Amal's presumed power. The childless Gupta is defeated, unable to contend with those more adept than him at keeping up appearances.

Elsewhere, Chaudhuri reinterprets two episodes from the Hindu mythologies. "An Infatuation" is the crude precursor to the epic Ramayana. After six days of watching Lord Ram from behind a bush, a powerful yet disfigured demon called Surpanakha falls in love with him. She steps forward, but the vain lord and his younger brother Lakshman humiliate her, Lakshman splicing her nose with a knife.

The second is a retelling of Lord Shiva's wedding. It sits comfortably close to Chaudhuri's contemporary story "The Second Marriage", despite the narrator's insistence that the two divorcees' renewed attempt at wedlock would not be "in that ageless lineage that had begun when Shiva had importunately stormed in to marry Parvati". But a line runs through them both, with Chaudhuri harking back to a time when marriage had "only one incarnation".

The same is true of Chaudhuri's style, often rigid and outmoded. He is at his best in "E-Minor", when reminiscing about his Bombay upbringing, then the times he returned to the city from London. Tellingly, fragments of Chaudhuri's fiction re-emerge alongside a measured, compassionate account of a schoolfriend's fight with smack addiction. This is a moving and inspiring finale, from a world still fighting its own addiction to colonialism.