Amit Chaudhuri - Interview by Sophie Harrison

Nirmalya Sengupta, the central character of Amit Chaudhuri's new novel, The Immortals, has elements of the writer's teenage self. This self carried a guitar and wrote poetry: growing up in a middle-class Bengali household in Bombay (Chaudhuri never says "Mumbai") was no insulation against adolescence. "I used to dress, as we call it in India, 'ethnically'. I wore an Indian-style coat, khadi stuff, and I just used to glare at people," Chaudhuri remembers. For a period in his youth, he tells me, he also had a quantity of facial hair. "Then I shaved one side of the moustache a little too much, so then had to shave the other side, and that's how I lost the moustache." Nirmalya undergoes a similar shearing at the end of The Immortals. He has left his hometown, Bombay, to go to university in London; after his arrival, he gives up his hair to an Italian barber off the Tottenham Court Road. It is a symbolic moment that has little effect - although he now looks completely (to use his own word) "normal", he is still not cured of his metaphysical turn of mind. Chaudhuri hasn't been either.

The Immortals is Chaudhuri's first novel for nine years, an interval he largely devoted to another of his passions, music. This is the kind of gap that editors find distressing, and indeed, as Chaudhuri points out with a tiny hint of pride, he has been described in this paper as a "publisher's nightmare". "I reacted against this professionalising of the author, in India and in Britain," he says. At one time he wanted to be a singer, and trained in the north Indian classical tradition. He has performed in India, Britain and America, and recently released an album, This Is Not Fusion, that explores the junctions between Indian classical and western popular traditions to frequently startling effect. As well as writing and performing music, he spent some time since A New World editing The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001), a huge project featuring 38 authors, including 20 translated from Indian languages into English. A short-story collection, Real Time, was published in 2002. Meanwhile, his first three novels - published in a single edition in the US under the title Freedom Song - won the Los Angeles Times book prize in 2003.