In My Beloved Life, Jadunath Kunwar, a historian, involving lining up the past with the present. Having lived through the evolution of modern India, Jadu wishes to tell “ the story of our nation at a point of time”,  but spends most of his life putting off the act of writing it all down. “ I’m not a  writer” a rural doctor tells another character.

An exceptionally moving novel that traces the arc of a man’s life, an ordinary life made exceptional by the fact that he was loved and has been loved in turn.

Born in 1935 to illiterate parents from rural Bihar, “ India’s poorest state”,  in a village  near George Orwell’s birthplace, Jadu travels to the state capital Patna for college, where the Indian-born American author himself grew up. Jadu’s mother while pregnant with him, nearly dies from a cobra bite.  A “serious” boy, Jadu undergoes an intellectual awakening when attending student poetry readings: “There was much to learn from them about language but also about how to live life”. His parents wish him to be a police officer: “ a man that people in the village would be afraid of”. He becomes an academic. Jadu in college, met the Sherpa who first summited Everest and wondering what it means to be modern. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, and as changes big and small sweep across India. Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes an historian.

Jadu sees his life as “ ordinary”, yet he exerts an influence he doesn’t quite credit on friends and students who become significant figures in literature or politics. Meanwhile history plays out alongside his low-key existence. India achieves independence when he is a child, he is touched by wars with China and Pakistan, and he is arrested during a period of political repression.

A persistent sense of irony exists between how we perceive Jadu and the story he tells of himself. “ His own experiences would not fill a book” he thinks , while we receive a richly material account of then. There are sudden jump into Jadu’s wife Maya’s consciousness that only last for a paragraph. Piercing, fleet-footed, and undeniably resonant, here is a novel from a singularly gifted writer about how we tell stories and write history, how individuals play a counterpoint to big movements, how no single life is without consequence.

Halfway through My Beloved Life, we pick up with Jadu’s daughter Jugnu, who is now a CNN reporter In America, she writes her elderly father’s obituary during Covid.

My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar, Picador £16.99, 352 pages