I have been a fan of Ranbir Sidhu’s ever since I read Dark Star. The stream-of-consciousness writing was impeccably styled, the story unravelling with the fluidity and unpredictably of a ball of yarn, bouncing where you didn’t expect it to.

I read Night in Delhi before it was officially published, in preparation for a panel on queer fiction I moderated at the Bangalore Literature Festival. I was afraid – what I was disappointed this time around? Instead, I was charmed, intrigued, riveted, and even disgusted (on the very first page, in the opening lines, a character urinates on the floor of the room he shares with two other men instead of stepping to the nearby bathroom). Sidhu has done it again, or maybe even better this time.

The story of a working-class queer man

There is very little queer fiction in India, especially the kind where queerness is incidental to the plot but central to the character. Night in Delhi is that rare piece of Indian fiction: a novel centring on a working-class queer man. Not an especially ethical or honest one, either: He is a crook, a con artist, an apparently ruthless man. Yet his motivations are easy to sympathise with: He wants to make enough money to go live in a house by the sea with his lover. Don’t many of us with a beloved and not enough money share that desire?

Sidhu excels at this form: A novel told by a first-person narrator whose name we never learn, who draws us into their world and leaves us gasping for breath at the intensity of their emotions. Unlike Dark Star, however, which pulsates largely in the realm of memory, the action in Night in Delhi is very much in the present.

A lot takes place in the novel, most of it brutal. It’s an erotic novel in some ways, but some of the sex is actually abuse, actually rape. Sidhu doesn’t bother explaining or moralising. Our narrator is too busy surviving – stealing, having sex, conning people, running away – and when he does ruminate, it’s often of the beauty of Delhi and of his beloved Jaggi.

Jaggi is not the stereotyped object of desire. He sings and dances like a dream, which brings him to the verge of fame and fortune, but he’s also crooked, also sometimes violent, keeping their third roommate cowed and resentful.

Our unnamed narrator-protagonist just cannot get a break. Moments of respite exist, like this one – “I rest a hand on Jaggi’s lap and am briefly happy, if happiness is a thing I have ever known” – but they’re very short and we’re plunged again into action, into a new scene with a victim to defraud or a villain to evade. As I read, I was afraid for him: There was no way this could end well, there was no way this anti-hero without even a name could get a happy ending.

It’s a novella, and I could see how it could have been expanded into the length of a novel, because some threads that were unravelled are eventually left dangling instead of being tied together neatly at the end. But it’s a better book for it, for raising questions that it doesn’t answer, for leaving some answers to our imaginations. If you lay out grand stakes and then push through the story to its conclusion, you are often visualising wholesale destruction. Or, if you offer a solution, a happy ending, it doesn’t seem convincing. But by leaving the story before it’s over, Sidhu lets us imagine that the evil machinery of greed and control can be stopped, or at least evaded. Hope is the bated breath.

Unmana is a writer based in Bangalore. Her debut novel Chikamma Tours (Pvt) Ltd was published in 2024. It is a queer bibliomystery.

Night in Delhi, Ranbir Sidhu, Context/Westland.