Such a Long Journey (novel) Critical Essay | Critical Review by Amit Chaudhuri

Critical Review by Amit Chaudhuri

SOURCE: Chaudhuri, Amit. “Parsi Magic.” London Review of Books 13, no. 7 (4 April 1991): 19.

In the following review of Such a Long Journey, Chaudhuri writes that Mistry's unique experience as an Indian expatriate writing in English allows him to form an image of India as a magical but real place.

The Parsis of Bombay are pale, sometimes hunched, but always with long noses. They have a posthumous look which is contradicted by an earthiness that makes them use local expletives from a very early age; and a bad temper which one takes to be the result of the incestuous intermarriages of a small community. The Parsi boys in my class had legendary Persian names like Jehangir and Kaikobad and Khusro. Their surnames, however, can be faintly ridiculous in their eloquence, like ‘Sodabottleopenerwalla’.

A Parsi writer I have read from boyhood onward is Busybee, the columnist. His real name,...
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