For some time now, the need for a contemporary novel that takes on the Indian political landscape head-on has been acutely felt. Quarterife, Devika Rege’s debut novel, arrives on the scene with elegance and aplomb.
It is 2014, a few months after a seismic national election that promises to change everything. The political parties will seem familiar to readers, as will the circumstances of fragile peace in which dangerous plays of power happen. A deluge of optimism, however, labels all worrying as a tendency to catastrophise; the air crackles with possibility.
Coming of age in new India
The Agashes have newly come into wealth, their life (and new flat) sparkling with the sanctimony of having made it in life by just working hard. Naren, their older son and an archetype of the good middle-class kid, has just returned from America after spending some years making money at a multinational firm, but also – he has this uneasy feeling – losing himself. Rohit, his younger brother, is all ambition and restlessness and boyish charm. He wants to make films, but not the crowd-pleasing mainstream Bollywood fluff; like all people with Creative Ambitions, he wants to tell a story. A real story, he insists, and most of his actions are animated by this desperation to encounter this elusive realness, in himself and others.
This search is entangled with Amanda’s, who comes to India with Naren, suffocated by a quiet, comfortable life in the American countryside. In India, as part of a fellowship that conducts its work in slums, she tells herself that she is different from the foreigners who wash up regularly on Indian shores to find themselves, and this project is more than an experience to pad her CV for an eventual graduate program in some kind of development studies. She wants to learn, she wants excitement, she wants speed and change; but when it comes to her, disfigured by material reality, doubt clouds over.
The Agashe children’s group of friends forms the ensemble cast. In the ever-transforming Mumbai, Bombay sticks to their tongue. From the balconies of their high rises, they look out at the city and deliberate the going-on in that other world, casually labelling some groups of people “our”, and others “them”. It is the all too recognisable perspective of a certain class of Indians, but the sharpness of Rege’s characterisation makes you marvel just how many inequalities can be glossed over in the name of common nationhood, and how perfectly acceptable to pontificate about others’ interests without sharing any of them.
In stark contrast to them is Omkar Khaire, a filmmaker who Rohit befriends, and one of the book’s most riveting and richly etched characters. Right-wing extremists would be too simplistic a description; navigating a mire of regional, caste, and communal politics, sometimes he infuriates, other times shows a mirror. Every time you contend with his worldview, you are left wondering about how faith makes and unmakes all that it touches, including political projects.
Future, future, future
Rege has a keen finger on the pulse of a generation of youth that treats inherited ideals like parents: stifling to live with, impossible to abandon. So compromises are made, but on what terms? Naren, for example, chases success with a belief in the promise of a good life in India like only someone of his demographic can – at the fertile cross-section of age, gender, caste and capital, for him, there is nowhere else better to be. If you asked him what could solve other Indians’ problems, he would probably tell you a technocratic, somewhat apolitical worldview, and a taste for wealth. Rege is never cruel, but always sharp, which works for Quarterlife not only because it captures the contradiction in the aspirations of a rapidly modernising India when put next to the reality of the vast rest of it, but also because it highlights the tragedy of a dream so grand.
Rege’s almost perfect capture of the zeitgeist is partly because of her ability to demonstrate the characters’ familiar loose grasp over time. The market is a god of its own; for them, liberalisation was the last big turn in Indian history, never mind the turmoil and violence of the years since. There is a vague sense of the past – a mention of Partition here, a call back to the mistakes of Nehru’s tenure and Gandhi’s beliefs there – but it is all to till the new soil of modern India. In fact, this is the mantra at the centre of all dramatic strife: future, future, future, as if you would miss catching it if you did not get there fast enough.
If there are some points where the story feels unnecessarily descriptively stretched, Rege more than makes up for it with her exceptional control over scenes. In an almost 25-page segment, for example, the tension at the core of the book’s themes is crystallised in dialogues so compelling that you almost feel present in the room yourself. Sometimes the characters get a rise out of you, and other times you heave a sigh of relief when somebody retorts with a response you had been thinking about too. Rege ditches moralising for observation, bringing out anxieties through her characters that may not seem novel, but the urgency of their appeal at that moment is. There is a moral current running through the narrative alright, but it only gently uncovers the fault lines of shared social and political life, myriad and web-like, implicating everyone alike.
In Rege’s able hands, the religious fanatics are people, as are the better-than-thou educated elite and all those in between. Carefully steering the narrative away from becoming a crusade to find reason in political pockets – those you might worship or revile – she makes the story one that bears witness to an extraordinary moment in history and does not let you look away either.
Quaterlife is an ambitious, exciting debut, and should be read as a testament to the clarity truth can gain from craft. If politics really is about the stories we tell ourselves, how frightening, it ventures, is the fate of those that may not survive?
Quarterlife, Devika Rege, HarperCollins India.