Amber Dusk  (English, Paperback, Chaudhuri Rajat)

AMBER DUSK smells of Calcutta streets and resonates with the seductive tunes of Parisian nights. Robot oracles, the enigmatic photographer Valence Jourdain, a shadowy Blue Princess, Indian tribesmen and the mystical Lake Malaren colour this fascinating narrative, creating an edgy reality. The novel presents a rich tapestry of ideas weaving together Calcutta and Paris and the lives and passions of the unforgettable individuals that walk their streets. Here is a delicately crafted story about love, loathing and beatitude and the quest for peace in a time of intolerance.

`Rajat Chaudhuri's Amber Dusk is a multi-levelled exploration of Love and other forms of Death where reality mixes and mingles with hyper­, super­, virtual­ and surrealities to leave the reader breathless. A global cast of identifiable yet strange and sublime characters ­ common saints, santhals, socialites and terrorists, pimps, prostitutes and gays, projectors and dreamers, actors, artists and astrologers, animated robots, talking birds and toys, prophets, revolutionaries, utopians, millenarians all flit across the dreamscapes of the protagonist Rishi's several lives and multiple forays into alternate worlds and times as the reader is taken on a vertiginious roller-coaster ride across cultures and continents. Calcutta is at the heart of this Quest Novel cum Bildungsroman cum psychedelic collage of Myth and Memory as Rishi ­ the central character ­ hunts for life's meaning with his lovers and antagonists that takes him finally to Stockholm's Lake Malaren (equi-significant to our own Manassarovar) and back to Kolkata following epiphanies and illuminations that take us through the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The title itself reveals the sensuous apperceptions and the inventive imagination of the author who creates images of Beauty and its evanescence almost on every page of this novel. Amber Dusk resonates with echoes from at least a triple pun ­ dusk falling around `Amber', a famed restaurant in the heart of Kolkata; golden sunsets fading and slipping into dusky twilight; and ``the cow-dust hour'' or ``godhuli lagna'' the most propitious time for marriage and romance when the Radhas and Krishnas of the world must set out on their glorious quests amidst the gathering gloom.

About the Author
Rajat Chaudhuri has written fiction, book reviews, travel and activist pieces in major Indian dailies like The Statesman, The Telegraph and Times of India. His short story Watersmoke, about the effects of genetically modified marijuana on the intellect, won a prize in the Scian Short Story Competition 2006.

Chaudhuri is founder of the civil-society group, Southern Initiatives. He has been a contributor to the UNDP Human Development Report. In the past he has worked for a consumer rights group, a Japanese Mission and had been an elected NGO representative at the United Nations, New York. He lives and writes in Calcutta.