Devika Rege’s debut novel, Quarterlife, published in 2023, explores the fraught political realities in India after the emergence of the right-wing nationalist party, which rose to power in 2014.
The story follows three people whose lives are deeply intertwined with each other and those around them. Set in Maharashtra — where business capital and Maratha identity collide and shape political tensions — the novel also traces how Hindu nationalist ideologies first took root and came to sustain.
Devika Rege’s Quarterlife opens up the ways in which each of these elements came to engage and contradict each other. In doing so, Rege’s work tries to provide a chorus to the multitude of ideological perspectives—and their impending fault lines—that make up the new India.
The story begins with Naren Agashe, a Green Card-wielding, Wall Street consultant, dismayed by his existence in America, who returns to Bombay, or Mumbai, full of ambition and potential for progress in the new India.
As Naren would say: “See, in every country’s life, there comes a golden age that will ride its transformation into a modern state. That means they will make wealth in a way neither their fathers could, nor their sons will.”
And when asked what makes it his generation, he says, “India won her political freedom in 1947 and her economic freedom came in 1991, but it wasn’t until this election that our political and business class got aligned. And just in time. Two-thirds of our population is under thirty-five. Couple that with a government focused on manufacturing, and we could become the world’s biggest labour force and consumer market in one go!”
Travelling with Naren is Amanda Harris Martin—Mandy—his former flatmate and university friend. Amanda, a white American, secures a fellowship to teach and document the lives of Muslims in Mumbai’s slums. Amanda comes with Naren and meets his brother, Rohit, who runs a film studio with his friends, Gyaan and Cyrus.
In each of these characters, there is a certain intent: While Naren seeks to move “towards freedom”, Amanda seeks to rediscover herself and to move “towards purpose”, and Rohit wants to understand his own roots and “towards identity”.
There are other characters too. There is Ifra, who runs the non-government organisation where Amanda is deputed, and who is dating Gyaan, and who is friends with the Agashes.
Until, one not-so-fine day, the day of “stalemate”, the day when Ifra decides to break up with Gyaan, and to leave India at once for Dubai, and later on to London, where she heads the World Bank. And then, there is also Cyrus, who is a Queer himself, but his politics do not go beyond his Queerness.
Manasi, who is in love with Naren, avoids discussing her identity, past, or politics—preferring instead to listen. Omkar Khaire aspires to make a film about Bappa—the annual Ganesha festival in Mumbai. Omkar, a young and brash member of the radical Hindu nationalist group Bharat Brotherhood, befriends Rohit, who is impressed with Khaire, and introduces him to the right-wing radical groups.
And with them is Kedar Agashe, the uncomfortable cousin of Rohit and Naren. Kedar is a journalist in a Marathi daily, whose ideas are deeply shaped by communist and anti-capitalist ideas.
In the chapter “Stalemate,” characters clash head-on, resulting in discomfort, tension, and hurt. In a remarkable telling of the drawing room conversation, each individual, who was, until then, friends with each other, is exposed to who they are, who they have become, and who they can become.
Finally, two tragedies unfold: old friendships fracture as new allegiances emerge, and on the climactic final day of the Ganesh festival, a riot erupts. Kedar is found dead on the railway tracks, and Amanda is brutally assaulted by the mob. Both tragedies leave the characters unsettled and guilt-ridden. And the reader is left uncomfortable.
Rege’s characters are psychologically complex: you may love them, only to begin questioning them pages later. And in doing so, Rege opens up multitudes that bind together the characters in their quarterlife.
At times, they confront their privileges in their deprivations—and vice versa—revealing how caste, class, religion, gender, and social realities sustain Modi’s India.
In the concluding section “Release,” Rege writes: “To give up guilt does not mean giving up responsibility. I thought of Amanda, how she never spoke of herself as a Christian, yet believed in the power of service instinctively, as any Hindu in meditating under a tree. Were these paths irreconcilable? I did not know the answer.” She adds: “While each character holds the potential for a truth that rivals the narrator’s, each is a world impossible to fully realise in her written voice. The forest grows in ways that surprise the soil.”
In this tense, slow-burning narrative, there are no villains—only multitudes that shape social relations. Rege’s characters are deeply informed, deeply polarised—or perhaps simply deeply human from the perspective of their own truths. Ultimately, Devika Rege’s Quarterlife serves as an ode to the deeply contested political realities in Modi’s India.