Very early into Quarterlife, there are a few lines that pulse with the beat to which the story marches. Rohit Agashe, one of the three protagonists of Devika Rege’s debut novel, is lying in his bed, unable to sleep. A few hours ago, while driving back to his upmarket suburban Mumbai flat, he’d been stopped by the traffic police for breaking the signal.
After only a short conversation with them about his older brother Naren’s return from America (“he wants to work for his soil now”) and their indignant cry of “do we look like those sort of cops” when he offers them “tea money”, he’s let off. Later, Rohit is restless, kept awake by the cops’ refusal to accept the bribe. He probes at the reason behind it and finally lands on the same one the cops attributed to his brother’s move to India — like Naren, they too have caught the wind. The wind of what? Of change, of course.
And Rohit, as he falls asleep, thinks of this change. Even he, who had earlier in the night felt nothing but a vague disinterest while his friends discussed politics, knows that this change is coming, and his next words feel both like a prayer and a yearning. He wants, more than anything, “to be at the centre when it all comes together, to be at the centre and to be young”.
There’s something in these words that tugs at you — a vulnerable, exposed hopefulness. We can feel Rohit’s need, the source of his restlessness. It’s this empathy that makes Rege’s storytelling sharp, but kind. What would be vicious becomes empathetic under a microscope of understanding as we see Naren, Rohit and Naren’s friend Amanda racing towards something, some end, past endlessly shifting goalposts.
Going back in time to 2014
Author Devika Rege
In the second half of the novel, this is spelt out in even clearer terms, with the chapters tellingly named ‘Rohit, Towards Identity’; ‘Amanda, Towards Purpose’; ‘Naren, Towards Freedom’. The book too moves through a landscape both familiar and uncomfortable. It’s 2014 when the story opens, and the Bharat party candidate, a Hindu nationalist with endless promises and a divisive campaign, has won the election. “Tweet after tweet” celebrating and congratulating the new prime minister sit uncomfortably with dissenting voices that feel eerily familiar. And, in a callback to Rohit’s words, at the centre of this story sit the three protagonists.
When we meet Naren, there’s a desperate unhappiness in him that feels volatile. His mind is a boiling pot of anxious thoughts, churning till he reaches a conclusion that’s almost too simplistic — “he knows what will cure him”. He decides to move back home. The pull of the familiar is too strong, and the promise of a better, improved India, too attractive.
Ironically, while it’s the need to move towards something familiar that will take Naren home, Amanda’s move to India is a bid to escape the stiflingly familiar: the “oppressive magnet” that her family home has become.
The interconnectedness feels organic and smooth. It makes sense that the lens is turned on these three, and that their lives have swirled into a single story.
Mirroring everyday reality
And each of them can see the other in ways they can’t see themselves. Naren feels an “irritation at (Amanda’s) project in India”, thinking of it as “the usual white thing”; Amanda notices Naren’s family’s hypocrisies and self-deceptions — while Mukta bai is “part of the family”, her bed is the floor in a cupboard under the stairs. Rohit’s heart catches at the tiredness in Naren’s voice, his irritation with his brother dissipating in the face of it.
But in her empathy, Rege doesn’t mince words, doesn’t gloss over the uncomfortable or the difficult. Every page you turn, the book’s universe mirrors our everyday reality, the hyperfused gaze magnifying the cracks. Naren, on their way from the airport, slips in mentions of his family’s worth to Amanda in a bid to impress her — their land, their staff, even their caste. We see the Agashes squirm when speared by a cousin’s sharp words about farmer suicides, during a family gathering. Later, they dismiss him easily — “he’s just Kedar being Kedar”. Rohit wants to chase authenticity, but not the authenticity of the “puffed up bumpkin” Kedar. It’s Amanda he thinks of as genuinely authentic, while Amanda works to impress Rohit, to show him that she’s a “culturally aware globetrotter”.
There are so many reasons to read Quarterlife, but the best, and perhaps the most rewarding of them, is the skill with which Rege lays out the inner world of her characters, and the contradictions that shape them. You want to admire the way Rege uses words to cut and soothe, all at once — to read some of the sentences aloud to yourself and take pleasure in how they sound.
What’s especially exciting is the freshness in Rege’s turn of phrase — the rhythm in her sentences feels new, and marks the arrival of a voice we’ve not heard before in Indian literature in English.
Quarterlife
Devika Rege
HarperCollins India
₹599
swati.daftuar@thehindu.co.in
