Devika Rege begins her timely, layered, and inquisitive debut novel Quarterlife with an epigraph by Kabir, a 15th century Indian poet. The inscription carries urgency, especially in Hindi. At a literal level, Kabir describes a lover’s red as so intense that the narrator sees the color wherever they look, and in the narrator’s search for redness, they take on the hue. Visually, the verses impart images of sweeping, suffusive scarlet, foreshadowing Quarterlife’s experimental, ever-expanding structure. Thematically, Kabir’s lines convey Rege’s rigor as she reckons with democracy.
A nuanced polyphonic portrait of contemporary India, Quarterlife examines how a Hindu nationalist general election victory cleaves a circle of 20 to 30-something friends in Bombay along stress points of religion, class, and caste. A flyaway veil separates Quarterlife’s fictional Bharat Party from Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Rege probes India’s intricacies with precision, but her inquiry offers broad insight. In Rege’s Bombay, people arriving at their politics, often in betrayal of their platonic, romantic, and familial relationships, parallel those worldwide.
In its first sections, Quarterlife’s narrator shifts its focus among brothers Naren and Rohit Agashe and Amanda Harris Martin, Naren’s former housemate from UPENN. The novel opens with Naren, a 31-year-old Wall Street-trained consultant whose “existence in America is like bread gone stale.” Given the New World’s disappointments, a “New India” beckons, and Naren finds direction in the Bharat Party’s promises for market development. Just after securing his green card, Naren buys a one-way ticket to Bombay, where he intends to capitalize on his Wharton School-infused Brahmin privileges. Twenty-seven-year-old New England-bred Amanda joins Naren’s flight to embark on an “India Impact Fellowship” in a Muslim-majority slum, unsuspecting of how the months-long commitment might impact her. She brings her camera, and her first images after touchdown include “a lingerie shop staffed by a woman in a burqa,” “colour-saturated laundry,” and “a window grille stuffed with everything from a bicycle to drying boxers, a yellow cat, and roses in rusted paint cans.” In Juhu, the posh Bombay suburb of Bollywood stars, 24-year-old Rohit helms a fledgling film studio with “this sense that he is at the cusp of an era.” Between the India Naren envisions and that Amanda hopes to see, to Rohit, “New India isn’t a vista but a moment: illiterate maids tapping emojis, expats doing non-touristy stuff like buying avocados from carts, the nightlife.”
Bringing together Twitterati, literati, and hoi polloi, Quarterlife reflects multifaceted political identities in its design. Midway, the novel’s narration grows from three protagonists to a chorus of nine. Three quarters in, almost 40 voices join. The myriad perspectives include Omkar Khaire, a poor lower-caste filmmaker who struggles to reconcile his Hindu nationalism with his regional Marathi upbringing. Rege’s rich, careful characterization of Omkar draws from her years-long field research with people across the ideological spectrum. As Amanda and Rohit develop a situationship, Amanda’s pastoral heritage prompts Rohit’s pursuit of cultural pride. Eager to celebrate his Marathi roots, Rohit hires Omkar for a documentary about Ganeshotsav, a Hindu festival honoring the deva Ganesha. But as he attaches to Omkar, Rohit’s syncretic constellation comes apart. Ifra Qureshi, a martini-loving Muslim It girl and CEO, reconsiders her long-term Hindu beau while Manasi Bansod, a corporate marketer with a low-caste surname, enters a serious courtship with upper-caste Naren. For years, these people have celebrated Diwali and Eid together. Six months after the election though, during a charged dinner at the Agashes for Ganeshotsav, Ifra finds that “the food has turned tasteless.” With a dazzling post-prandial debate scene, Rege surveys the subcontinent’s competing historiographies.
There is a lot going on, and the characters are a hall of mirrors, constantly judging each other, shedding insights as they try to place themselves. Rege retains control. A delicate scene between Manasi and Amanda shows Rege’s skill for calibrating tensions and distilling complex social dynamics. On one level, Rege has constructed a conversation between a middle-class Indian pragmatist and an American idealist. At another level, the exchange sparkles with the contradictions of female friendship, illuminating minute moments of two women defining themselves against each other, even though they have agreed to meet up as friends. When Amanda quotes an Anne Carson line about wanting to be unbearable, Manasi expresses her exhaustion. “I have crises too, but I don’t have the luxury of spending six months in another country to find out what I’d rather be doing,” Manasi says, pointing out Amanda’s privilege. On having found someone privileged to date in Naren, Manasi retorts, “what about me makes prioritizing my happiness so appalling to you?”
Like a deft accordion player, Rege compresses her characters into archetypes and aerates them. Late in the novel, when Manasi asks Naren what makes life worthwhile, he cannot give a more typical list: “The weight of a good whiskey glass, white sheets in a five-star, airplane sunsets.” Elsewhere, Naren also “wonders in what proportion all these factors — his personality, the interpersonal, society and its institutions — had colluded to land him where they did.”
Taking readers from a chawl to high-rises, Quarterlife is a comprehensive novel that admits its limits. If Kabir’s red stands for complicity, Rege explores how it stains her too. Although Quarterlife came out in the United States right before the 2024 presidential election, it speaks to those trying to understand Donald Trump’s electoral gains in counties as diverse as Kings and Queens. Rege’s premise is not unlike democracy, an effort toward a more inclusive collective even as perfection remains elusive.
***
Quarterlife
by Devika Rege
Liveright; 416 p.
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