Devika Rege’s debut novel, Quarterlife, published in 2023, opens up the fraught political realities in India after the emergence of the right-wing nationalist party rose to power in 2014. The story follows three people whose lives are deeply intertwined with each other and those around them. Set in the Indian state of Maharashtra, where both business capital and Maratha identity collide and complicate political relations, the Hindu nationalist vision first took shape.
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, or Mandy, his former flatmate and a university friend. Amanda is a white American who has secured a fellowship to teach and document the lives of Muslims in the slums of Mumbai. 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.
There is Manasi, who is in love with Naren, who does not so much like to discuss her identity, her past, and her politics, and in doing so, cover it all up in good listening. And then, there is Omkar Khaire, who wants to make a film on the Bappa, the annual Ganesha festival in Mumbai. Omkar is a young, brash individual with ties to a radical Hindu nationalist outfit, Bharat Brotherhood. He 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 Devika Rege’s chapter section titled “Stalemate”, these characters come head-on with each other, causing discomfort, tension, and even 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.
And finally, two tragedies hit. One, at the end of the day, old friendships are broken, and new allegiances are formed. Second, towards the climactic act of the final day of the Ganesh festival, a riot breaks out. At the end of the day, Kedar is found dead on the railway track, and Amanda is brutally raped by the mob. Both tragedies leave the characters unsettled and guilt-ridden. And the reader is left uncomfortable.
Each character, in Devika Rege’s Quarterlife, comes across as a complex psychological being. At once, you love them—and within a few pages in, you disdain them. And in doing so, Rege opens up multitudes that bind together the characters in their quarterlife. At times, these characters are introduced to their own privileges in their deprivations and deprivations in their privileges, opening up their own lives in relation to their caste, class, religion, gender, and other social realities that sustain Modi’s India.
Towards the end of her work, in the section titled “Release”, Devika Rege tells us: “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 storytelling, there are no villains. There are just multitudes that shape social relations. Rege’s characters are all deeply informed—and therefore deeply polarised—or perhaps, deeply informed from their perspective. Therefore, Devika Rege’s Quarterlife is an ode to the deeply contested political realities in Modi’s India.