Quarterlife: A Novel
“Quarterlife, is an essential work of fiction, enriched by its author’s complex feelings about her country. . . . one of the most ambitious literary works to come out in years.”
Devika Rege’s novel Quarterlife is a colorful, panoramic portrait of life in contemporary India, the literary equivalent of a colorful, bustling Diego Rivera mural. The time is 2014, the year Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, promising affluence and national pride.
Against a backdrop that takes the reader through many sections of this vast country and depicting many people of different social strata, the novel focuses on three characters: the brothers Naren and Rohit Agashe and their American friend Amanda, a descendant of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant stock.
Trained at Wharton, Naren got a good job on Wall Street, but experienced an identity crisis that took him first to Waverly, Nebraska, then back home to Mumbai, where he quickly rose in financial circles. Naren is a pragmatist and a materialist. Late in the novel, he tells his fiancé, “I accept the world for what it is and that I must situate myself in a place where the system works for me.” That place is Modi’s India. After years of emotional numbness in America, he learns that “the difference between a privileged and an oppressed mind is that the privileged mind has no doubt that if he plays his cards right, he will be the protagonist.”
Naren’s younger brother Rohit does not have the same intellect, but he has the gift of making people like him. Rohit has founded an independent film company and has hired as the director of his first feature film, Omkar, a proud follower of Modi’s party who has both ambition and frustration because of “the diploma that got no job, . . . the film fraternity that won’t back him because of his loyalty to the one association that hasn’t let him down [Modi’s Bharat Party].” The fate of Rohit and Omkar’s film and friendship is one thread of the narrative.
Naren has traveled back to India with his American friend, Amanda, who has felt trapped by her life on the New England family farm and her doting Moldovan boyfriend. She has been awarded a three-month fellowship with a charitable organization to work in the Mumbai slums, where her American idealism has fatal consequences for one of her colleagues. Amanda embarks on a turbulent relationship with Rohit. Amanda’s story is a variation on the trope of the American trying to do good in a culture she does not fully understand. Ultimately, India inspires in her enormous anger, then “an impossible fatigue. . . . If there was an instinct connecting her thoughts with her gut, India has undone it.”
The novel alternates chapters centering on these three protagonists set against the background of clashes between the new capitalist India and the disaffected people’s longing for a fictional Hindu past. The novel’s climax at a festival in honor of the god Ganesha that turns chaotic and violent, is a terrifying, virtuoso piece of writing.
Devika Rege has created fascinating leading characters whose identity crises are set against a country going through its own identity crisis. They are surrounded by a dizzying number of supporting characters representing different backgrounds and points of view: Naren’s fiancé Manasi, who is going through her own journey of self-discovery; a gay couple trying to forge a relationship while fearing rejection from their traditional parents; and Kedar, an idealistic journalist who writes against Hindu nationalism and local corruption at a time when the new government is shutting down opposition newspapers.
One important strand in this saga of the new India is the limited role of women. Naren’s fiancé Manasi would like to be a protagonist in her story but wonders whether the struggle would be worth it. She has a complex friendship with the self-absorbed American, Amanda.
Class, caste, religion, politics, ambition all intersect and collide in a saga that will have tragic consequences for some of the characters and lead others to question their responsibility for the fates that befell people close to them. At the end, one of the protagonists feels “like a child who knows from his mother’s tone that he has messed up, though he isn’t entirely sure of his crime.” Are the protagonists complicit or is the current state of the nation responsible?
If there is any weakness in Quarterlife, it is the surfeit of arguments on the current state of India. Rege tells her story best through the thoughts and actions of her leading characters. The lengthy scenes of groups gathering in rooms to argue stop her narrative in its tracks. At one point Rege quotes Walt Whitman, and there are times in Quarterlife where she, too, wants to “contain multitudes” in her work including, every possible point of view on the state of her country.
For those of us who are Indiaphiles, Quarterlife, is an essential work of fiction, enriched by its author’s complex feelings about her country. It is one of the most ambitious literary works to come out in years.