Novelist and short story writer Abhijit Chaudhuri was born on 1 September 1963 in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. His place of birth, a rented house at 26/6 Surya Sen Street, was very close to College Street, the cultural capital of the-then Bengal and, to some extent, India.
The dark and gloomy lanes— buzzing with the mechanized clatter of the traditional printing press— where little Abhijit grew were the dwelling place for the lower middle class of the Bengali society but love and hope prevailed even in the most frustrating of human conditions fighting with abject poverty.
Fairy tales and folklore of the traditional Bengal mingled with the magnificent heroic sagas from the two great epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, were in the air as well as in the lips of grandmother and mother, the two women who greatly influenced the boy in shaping his dreams and his imaginations.
However, the surreal ambience of the central Kolkata, its long afternoons, its dreamy evenings submerged in the fragrance of autumnal flowers and Mughal cuisine had its share in grooming the boy for a bigger, grander, more exotic world. The intricate lanes, bye-lanes and alleys introduced the boy to a magical adult world whose inhabitants were beggars, magicians, revolutionaries and even prostitutes.
When Abhijit was just six years old the entire family got shifted to Konnagar, Hooghly. It was there that he received his formal education. Seeds of creative writing were woven in the boy’s mind by some of the charismatic teachers in high school who encouraged the boy to become a writer in future. Life suddenly became less cruel and more in harmony with the uncomplicated suburban friends and the lush greenery of the beautiful countryside just outside the industrial town that kept its time with the blowing sirens of the factories
Abhijit returned to the metropolis to do his graduation (1983) and post graduation in English Literature (1985) and subsequently to receive a post graduate diploma in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations. (1991-1992)
Mr. Chaudhuri began his professional career with the Indian Railways in 1988 only to leave the job next year in order to join the prestigious West Bengal Civil Service (Executive) as a Probationary Officer.
This was the turning point of Abhijit’s life. He began to enjoy his profession as a Block Development Officer: meeting people from all walks of life, getting frequently transferred to new places, accommodating with changing topographies, being introduced to different obscurities, oddities and crises.
The resultant experience soon started to produce novels and short stories of rare merit. Although Abhijit’s first published work was Shobdo Theke Mukto Jharuk (‘Let Pearls Drop from the Words’), a book of poems back in 1986, the young author soon realized that fiction was his forte and thus began an uninterrupted flow of writing producing not less than twenty volumes of novels and short stories. His fiction is both popular and critically acclaimed.
