The New York Times devoted an editorial last week to the return of Tony Soprano, which in itself might be a celebration of sorts, but the editorial had a mournful touch to it. It noted that the first episode of this season had “literally ended with a bang”: a bullet in Tony Soprano’s belly, and, to make it worse, the show has also taken a hit, its viewership dipping from the previous season’s 12.1 million to a measly 9.5 million. The Times editorial speculated that the dip might have to do with rival shows as well as the long hiatus that has divided this season from the last one. It ended with the following words: “But some viewers are no doubt turning away because they suspect that Tony’s life story is not going to end happily, and they may be reluctant to watch the narrative arc of a character they have come to care about start pointing relentlessly downward. Tony could still have breakthroughs, in therapy and in life. But starting the season lying in a pool of his own blood, not knowing if help will arrive, he is certainly off to a bad start.”

It might have been that slight shading of narrative theory in the concluding sentences of the editorial that made me veer off into literary matters, and I went to my book-shelf and extracted Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World: I was looking for a passage where I had read a description of an elderly couple watching an American soap in Calcutta, and how the television narrative intersects with the narrative of their own lives, in particular the break-up of their son’s marriage in America, and the resulting confusion and loss. (Why did I go looking for this passage? Partly because I wanted to refresh my memory of Amit’s characteristically subtle prose, rich with humor and irony. But also because the Times editorial had made me think of how millions of viewers, with their own multiple, and inexhaustible, stories must be making sense of Tony’s woes in very different ways, especially if you’re talking of people in places as diverse as Khartoum and Copenhagen. And I was thinking also about Iraq, how a larger historical narrative like that, a tsunami of a downward spiral if you will, might even add resonance to stories like Tony’s, with its own theme of exaggerated violence and the clear premonitions of a bad end, or even many bad ends.) In any case, here is the passage I was thinking of from A New World:

For the Admiral and Mrs Chatterjee, the television was always on in the evening until a year ago; it didn’t matter if they were watching it or not; the colors of one of the five channels, a rainbow of the chatter and information of the new India, kept changing in one corner of the room. Then, last year, during the second, prolonged custody battle, they’d neglected a couple of episodes of a soap, forgot, as if they’d inadvertently swallowed a pill that erased recent memory, whether Hersh was sleeping with Jordan (you couldn’t tell, from the names, which sex who belonged to) or Richard had finally deserted Anastasia; they’d found they could no longer immerse themselves, or even find a center, however temporary, in a proxy existence. One day, three months ago, when Mrs Chatterjee was sitting absently before the TV with the remote control in her hand (she could never fathom how best to use it; she couldn’t cope with the choice it presented to her, and suffered when it was in her control), she saw a face and heard a voice that was dimly familiar. The blonde, sturdy-jawed woman was someone who she’d met before: it was Anastasia. She was filled with longing for a bygone simplicity.

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