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Sex has a habit of selling. Obviously that is a cliché, but the reasons why it sells vary from person to person. There are the voyeurs who like to gratify their private fantasies by sharing them with the author, or perhaps visualizing themselves and the author in bed together in some incredible literary orgy. There are the critics who like to turn their noses up at sex and therefore like to see how low the author can go. Then there are some who believe that sex equates to freedom of speech and who are always overjoyed to see it displayed in its splashiest colors. And there are the ones who believe that sex can be used to display contempt because its function is sufficiently eschatological, if you look at it. And then there are the shadings of all these categories in a state of confusion that could be anything with undertones of love and tenderness and I’ve got you under my skin thrown in.

And then there’s Upamanyu Chatterjee, who has his own sexual agenda. As the whole world knows Chatterjee shot straight to the top of the sex charts with his English August. Where, of course, sex was not sex, but a stranded man’s way of expressing his contempt of himself, the tribals around him and of the ICS system in general. Sex there was frustration and satire, used by the author to hold a mirror up to society and get under the reader’s skin in an Aristophanes inspired kind of way.

After the complexities and word chewing of The Last Burden and Mammaries of a Welfare State, Losing Weight is a return to English August territory in the sense that the protagonist at its heart is a lonely, apparently intelligent and confused man. Bhola, the right name for a fat confused schoolboy leads a confused private school existence which is overshadowed by his lust for the Anglo Indian sports master. His friend Dosto calls him The Bitch, which he thinks, is another of those perfect names for someone who is obviously gay. Except that Bhola finds, to his dismay that he is neither of them and swings like a pendulum between the sexes. In school the pendulum is slightly restricted by Bhola’s inability to control his body and his desires, which leads to his summary rustication. Disorientated in any case, Bhola keeps the whole episode a secret from his father and stepmother, fabricates a secret study and spends time on his terrace chatting to Anin, the girl next door. All that results in a strange tangle of lust between him Anin, her Alsatian and Dosto who drops by, hopeful to see Bhola lose his virginity. This surprisingly ends in Bhola’s coming in the top ten in his final examinations, which he gives privately. However, this educational success does very little for Bhola except enable him to pursue the object of his desires.

And despite his obsession with sex, Bhola finds it hard to commit himself to any kind of relationship. He scurries here and there falling for eunuchs and landladies and other unsuitable people, presumably with the intention of hiding his own inability to commit from himself. This is his reaction at meeting a vegetable seller at his front door: The patches of perspiration at her armpits extended to her breasts. With the edge of her sari, she scrubbed away at the exudation and heat on her upper lip, cheeks, neck and throat. He tries to distract himself from his lust by enumerating all the diseases that can be caused by indiscriminate sex. However, the listing fails to cure him. Losing track of her in his hometown, he chases her to an obscure medical college in the hills and finds her miraculously metamorphosed into a nurse with her husband in tow.

The book follows the ups and downs of Bhola’s life. Bhola died at the age of 37 and between the ages of 18 and 37 he had just 8 sexual partners, four women and four males. When he reviewed his life…it pleased him that he had maintained a balance between the genders. Of course, he was light-heartedly embarrassed at how few people he had slept with. The reader, at this stage might be forgiven for wondering what on earth was going on in Bhola’s head and why. Wastrel is a word that comes to mind along with decadent. The other word that floats in and out frequently is meaningless. That could be taken as the reader’s sharing of Bhola’s existence. It could also be taken as a tribute to the darkness that pervades the novel.

There are certainly weighty lessons to be learnt from Weight Loss of the skull contemplating timor mortis conturbat me variety. The ‘bindu’ says the cartoon on the book’s cover, is a drop or globule, a metaphysical point out of time and space. Bhola adds another obsession to all his other obsessions, "weight loss", a dream of shedding excess weight and becoming slim, but also a dream of renouncing all the excess in his life and becoming pure, leaving the lusts of the world that drag him down and following the traditional Hindu path of sanyas. However, the language that Chatterjee uses makes it clear that Bhola’s fantasies of purity are ultimately death related: He would sink into the scalding morass and then burn, burn; he would at last emerge in another life, pale, whittled down to the bone, thin and light, bleached of all desire. The tone is set with the very first sentence, “Only when you die will you cease to feel ridiculous.”

Perhaps after all this isn’t about Aristophanes and Greek dictates of satire, but Jean Genet or even Baudelaire. Indo Anglican literature reinvented as a slow walk through the Flowers of Evil, with excessive thoughts heaped on excessive thoughts and disgust piled high. The ingredients are certainly there, sex, syphilis, humiliation, the cocktail of drugs and alcohol shaken up with mysticism. Gaugain suffered from syphilis amongst the noble savages in outpouring of creativity while Genet watched his lover pick lice out of his hide with mingled love and disgust. In literary criticism, the poet is seen as an outcast of modern society, despised by its rulers who fear his penetrating insights into their spiritual emptiness. Chatterjee’s use of literary allusions throughout is appropriate and pointed. The only problem is, Bhola is not a poet or a painter but an indifferent medical student, so that his discoveries amongst the damned are restricted to outpourings.

Weight Loss is not a humorous book, though a vividly written and erudite one, Life is a bitch and then you die. Bhola marries a woman with a golden voice but realizes that he loves her only when he discovers that he cannot bear to touch her because his corruption will spread to infect her too. The two of them have a child, a daughter, but the darkness that surrounds Bhola threatens to envelop her when his past catches up with him. And he is filled with a frantic tenderness to save her. Bhola takes the obvious way out of a life that he fails to comprehend.

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