Within the opening pages of Devika Rege’s debut novel Quarterlife, one of many protagonists, Naren Agashe, goes to the Lincoln Zoo in Nebraska to purchase a espresso. After an older man threatens him at his normal café, Naren doesn’t need to take any probabilities: He’d fairly sip the insipid beverage bought on the zoo’s reward store, the one place close by that sells espresso, than danger one other spherical of abuse from the racist loon, who he fears could pull a gun on him if provoked.
As he walks across the zoo, Naren is arrested by the sight of an odd creature. It’s a “jaguon,” in response to the placard earlier than its enclosure, a “hybrid born of the unintended mating of a black jaguar and a lioness.” Watching the animal pacing “a cage barely the scale of his kitchen,” Naren feels its restlessness. Even when it had been to leap out of its jail and escape, its “animal mind,” he thinks, could be “bewildered by a sudden mobile eager for a non-existent habitat.”
Within the opening pages of Devika Rege’s debut novel Quarterlife, one of many protagonists, Naren Agashe, goes to the Lincoln Zoo in Nebraska to purchase a espresso. After an older man threatens him at his normal café, Naren doesn’t need to take any probabilities: He’d fairly sip the insipid beverage bought on the zoo’s reward store, the one place close by that sells espresso, than danger one other spherical of abuse from the racist loon, who he fears could pull a gun on him if provoked.
As he walks across the zoo, Naren is arrested by the sight of an odd creature. It’s a “jaguon,” in response to the placard earlier than its enclosure, a “hybrid born of the unintended mating of a black jaguar and a lioness.” Watching the animal pacing “a cage barely the scale of his kitchen,” Naren feels its restlessness. Even when it had been to leap out of its jail and escape, its “animal mind,” he thinks, could be “bewildered by a sudden mobile eager for a non-existent habitat.”
Quarterlife: A Novel, Devika Rege, Liveright, 416 pp., $29.99, September 2024
Within the jaguon, Naren appears to acknowledge one thing of his personal predicament as a green-card-holding white-collar skilled in the USA within the 2010s. The 31-year-old Wharton graduate from India has clung to a advisor job even after the monetary crash. But he’s unable to rise in company America, a destiny made worse by a foul breakup. An object of pity to his colleagues, deracinated from his homeland, Naren longs for his personal non-existent habitat—till a landmark election in India opens the door to surprising financial alternative again residence.
Again in New Delhi, the right-wing Bharat Get together has come to energy with a sweeping in style mandate after campaigning on a promise to finish corruption and usher in a brand new India. Quickly, mind drain begins to reverse as prodigal Indians like Naren return residence, seduced by the promise of a trillion-dollar economic system and a newly anointed prime minister. Liberal Indians accuse the chief of getting harmless blood on his fingers for fueling sectarian violence, however his loyal military of militant Hindus ignores his previous as a blip on the trail to progress.
The parallels with India’s 2014 nationwide elections and the rise of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Get together are conspicuous. However Rege doesn’t deal with the political aftermath of these elections, such because the mob violence towards minorities that erupted within the years that adopted or the nation’s deepening youth unemployment disaster. As an alternative, Quarterlife dives into the psyche of the era born on the cusp of India’s financial liberalization in 1991: younger individuals awakening into political consciousness within the twenty first century, confused by the bags of their colonial inheritance and globalization bringing in non-Indian methods of considering and dwelling.
A younger girl holds a balloon as she stands on a road in style for its nightlife in Bengaluru on April 27. Valeria Mongelli/Getty Photos
Quarterlife, which was printed in India in 2023 however got here out in the USA final month, is certainly one of a number of current books by Indian or Indian-origin writers that discover the rise of Hindu nationalism amongst younger individuals, who presently comprise greater than half of India’s inhabitants of 1.4 billion. This consists of the novels and nonfiction of Aatish Taseer, who has examined how Indian communities got here to wield Hinduism as a political weapon, and the work of journalists equivalent to Snigdha Poonam and Kunal Purohit, whose reportage has sought to make sense of the function of younger Indians in shaping their nation’s political equipment over the previous decade.
In Quarterlife, Rege is curious about what takes place contained in the drawing rooms of Mumbai’s nouveaux riches—Exhibit A being Naren’s household and its social circle. They’re a part of an upwardly cell class who stay in a fictional complicated known as Imperial Heights (“a ridiculous title,” Naren thinks, “simply the sort to attraction to upstarts come into cash accidentally”).
The Agashe household, whose scions are unfold throughout Mumbai, Pune, and Brisbane, has lately grow to be rich by the sale of ancestral land to a mining shark, whose operations are wreaking havoc on the atmosphere. Solely Naren’s uncle, a small enterprise proprietor, has remained steadfast in refusing to promote his portion. Like hundreds of thousands of Indians, he’s a bundle of contradictions. He considers himself a “leftist” who cares for the atmosphere and his employees, however he additionally helps the ruling authorities regardless of its environmentally unfriendly and right-wing insurance policies, as he has misplaced religion within the earlier system that was nominally socialist.
Naren and his youthful brother Rohit are clearer about their political allegiances, swayed by the brand new authorities’s promise of turning India into a worldwide superpower. However they quickly notice that they’re deeply divided from their friends of their expertise of the world.
Between the Agashe brothers—who’re Chitpavan Brahmins, a sub-caste inside the highest rung of the Hindu caste hierarchy—and their assorted buddies, Rege packs in a variety of characters throughout India’s social strata. They embrace a lower-caste filmmaker from rural Maharashtra; a girl who, regardless of her class privilege, is marginalized as a Muslim; a younger liberal, formed by the secular values of India’s Structure (the sort of individual routinely mocked by India’s proper wing as “sickular”); and a member of India’s Zoroastrian Parsi group who thinks his insignificance within the non secular hierarchy protects him from anti-Hindu hate—till the police upbraid his Hindu boyfriend not a lot for being homosexual, however for courting somebody from a minority group.
The plot of Quarterlife is organized round two important occasions: Naren’s transfer to India from the USA and his American good friend Amanda’s resolution to tag together with him to work with an NGO. As Naren negotiates the dynamics of massive enterprise, Amanda steps right into a Mumbai slum to doc the lives of its girls and youngsters. Overwhelmed by this different India that borders the pockets of luxurious inhabited by Naren and his buddies, she spirals into a private disaster, difficult by an unexpectedly intense love affair with Rohit.
On the face of it, Rohit and Amanda come from completely disparate backgrounds—one having grown up in suburban Mumbai, the opposite in small city New Hampshire. However within the age of free commerce and motion, they’re each homogenized as “international residents.” Amanda feels at residence with Rohit’s English-speaking, cocktail-sipping, Adidas-wearing buddies. As time passes, nonetheless, these commonalities start to crumble.
Youngsters climb onto the home windows of a faculty to catch a glimpse of a efficiency by artists dressed as cartoon characters contained in the Dharavi slums in Mumbai on Oct. 14, 2022. Indranil Mukherjee/AFP through Getty Photos
Whereas Quarterlife follows a structured plot, it is usually a deeply discursive novel. Pages of dense dialogue are interspersed all through, with concepts and opinions flying thick and quick. The protagonists are outspoken and unafraid of verbal duels, their arguments carrying the material of their friendship skinny, jeopardizing loyalties, and ruining romantic potentialities. These exchanges, typically excessively verbose, function home windows into the internal lives of the characters, who act as conduits of tension and aspiration for his or her class and group.
Because the moon-eyed, white American do-gooder, Amanda serves as a foil to her friends. She could not know what a Dalit is, however she sees starvation and poverty the place her Indian counterparts ignore it. “Truthfully, individuals combating for 2 meals a day don’t care about half these things we’re debating,” she says in a match of rage, disrupting an mental tirade on the Agashes’ residence. Her ethical edge doesn’t land properly, particularly with Rohit. He’s stung by her self-righteousness towards individuals like him, who’ve been lifted out of semi-poverty by luck or labor to achieve India’s 1 %.
Two different characters enable Rege to discover deeper questions of belonging. First, there’s Kedar, Naren’s cousin, who’s mocked as a “vernie”—a pejorative for individuals who converse vernacular versus English—by his city-bred cousins. He’s a reporter with Hindi and Marathi newspapers, exposing land encroachment by grasping industrialists. Kedar’s idealism is bracing, similar to Amanda’s, however in his case, it comes at a devastating value.
In distinction, Omkar, Rohit’s newfound good friend, is raring to forge his means forward within the new India. A younger man from a small city within the state of Maharashtra, he deplores the upper-caste Marathas, who rejected him for his lowly social standing (“backward caste, class, every thing”). His ambition is to make a documentary on the Ganesha competition, however liberal arthouse movie producers received’t assist him due to his dedication to the Bharat Get together as a foot soldier of the occasion’s youth wing.
Omkar is elated by the hovering wave of Hindutva. He sees the occasion’s ascension as a triumph of anti-elitism fairly than a profitable technique of focused violence towards minority communities. “Solely the Bharat Get together cares for all Hindus,” he boasts. In Omkar’s view, the time has come for individuals like him, who’re the voice of “Bharat”—a Sanskrit and Hindi title for India—to talk as one, overcoming their historic neglect by the Anglicized lessons representing “India.” (Modi, by the way, recognized his nation as “Bharat” whereas chairing the G-20 summit in New Delhi final yr.)
Rohit’s friendship with Omkar turns into the set off that blows up close-knit allegiances. Rohit is charmed by Omkar’s “son of the soil” pitch; he sees Omkar’s steadfast religion within the Bharat Get together’s doctrine as an indication of hope, particularly in comparison with the political cynicism of others in his milieu. However his buddies assault Omkar’s earnest championing of Hindu nationalism. They gang up towards Omkar, calling him a fraud and trickster, and accuse him of manipulating the sympathies of the city elite for private achieve. The 2 faces of India and Bharat in the end combat out a bitter blame sport, every pointing fingers on the different for bringing the nation to a state of disaster.
In an Indian Categorical article this yr, Rege wrote that Quarterlife is an “try to know how, round 2014, our political identities grew to become all-encompassing in a means that that they had not been earlier than, and what this meant for the unfold of Hindu nationalism.” The end result of her quest isn’t flawless, but it surely captures a elementary fact concerning the twenty first century, not simply in India however all around the globalized world: that life is riddled with battle and asymmetry amongst individuals near and much from each other.
