Quarterlife: A Novel

by Devika Rege

Mir. Bekhudi le gayi kahaan humko, der se intezaar hai apna.

‘See, in every country’s life,’ he says, ‘there comes a golden generation 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.

As for his country, he decides, turning off the shower, it is only a matter of time before this clumsy puberty has passed. The washer and dryer are as much a part of the apartment’s fabric as in the West, and the new brands of yogurt and juice suggest that the days of plastic buckets and steel vessels are numbered. Until then, he must take pride in his present, for to suffer it in this way betrays not just your poor stock or choices but that you don’t stand by your stock and your choices. He presses his face to the towels, the blue detergent smell he has known all his childhood, and reminds himself: This is you, this is yours — love it, love it, love it.

‘They say America holds on to these things because their age of domination is over, that they are looking back instead of to the future,’ he says. ‘Still, it’s funny how one goes from a five-thousand-year-old civilization to a three-hundred-year-old country to learn about nostalgia.’

We’re in the age of social media; who isn’t cultivating an image? My problem is when you flaunt it like it’s some ethical choice. In the end, you can tell a people’s privilege from their complacence that they are the good, the aware, the standard-bearers.’

‘Wear all the masks you want, just don’t be surprised by your face when it catches you in a mirror.’

Most Indians in America got there in the sixties. They were educated, they had pedigree, they only needed jobs. We’re one of the highest-earning ethnic minorities, there’s almost a positive bias.’

There was nothing so spectacular about your Maratha Empire. Shivaji is a folk legend that the right wing props up because they love the idea of a Hindu crusader after centuries of Islamic rule. And the Peshwas weren’t even kings. They were Shivaji’s ministers who took over the show after he died…’

she cares less about who she is and more about what she is for.

What is the culture of a place or people other than this — how we lived and how we died? What is an identity but an accretion of all those sensations, however fleeting or slight, aroused by every encounter with the world that tells you where and among whom you belong … or do not?

We talk lovingly of grandparents who made racist comments because to judge them in the present daylight is a historical imprudence, and we are careful to talk this way only around insiders who feel the same pride and guilt and will not raise eyebrows because this is polite company. So it is all a little joke, this ‘self-deprecation’ that makes nostalgia for a past of greater inequality edible, merely something to be sentimental about when the modern world is so vulgar. But the joke will never exhaust…

These North Indians think they have culture because they go to Lucknow for Urdu poetry. Such fetishes are colourful, but India’s real culture is preserved in the south. Meaning, the cradle of our civilization was invaded and occupied by foreigners for so long, its essence was lost. But the history of India is not the history of Delhi. The Mughals did not have the same control down here; we had Hindu kings ruling us right until the British. That is why we have confidence in ourselves. And the reform movements, like women’s rights and anti-caste, took off here, while the north is still feudal and full of brutes.

Raw air of jungle vines, faint tang of Lifebuoy soap. Everything so wet it makes you want to pee. The heart of the town has all its shutters open. Dreamflower talc … doodh dahi colddrink … STD ISD PCO. Nostalgia for the town’s mediocrity, for childhood brands that he assumed the whole country left behind

Omkar’s hatred of the old guard is real … but he hasn’t thrown the baby out.

Friends, Brothers, Lovers

‘Hindu culture, Hinduism, it is all fucking wordplay,’ drawls Gyaan. ‘It is how the right slips the scalpel under the skin, and this is the irony: there is nothing Hindu about their ideology at all. It is a fundamentalist credo that takes its tropes from Western fascists. Hinduism is about non-violence; it is about tolerance.’

‘The Bharat Party is very clever in how they target each level of society. You can’t feed a poor man culture, so they will rename the Conclave Party subsidies and take the credit. Next comes the blue-collar class where you have this small-town youth who just got a phone and a bike and has this inflated sense of his potential, and now he needs to know he’s better than the liberal elite who kept him down. It is the revenge of the plebs. And the minorities are collateral damage…’

‘The people who have no excuse are the aspirational class. Upper-caste white collars, NRIs. The West is in recession and the whites are getting hostile, so the NRI comes back looking for India. This is what the Hindu nationalists have given him: a chest-thumping Indian dream that nicely justifies all the money he will make.’

This isn’t America where abortion or gun control can become a polarizing issue. No one wants to immigrate here. No one cares about the climate. As for the economy, let’s be honest, we’re all some degree of capitalist and democrat. If we engage in such debates, it’s because they’re fun and not that we have any new ideas on how to save the world.’

Mere seene mein nahin toh tere seene mein sahi, ho kahin bhi aag lekin aag jalni chahiye.’

‘Oh, this nostalgia for the socialist era. Why don’t you ask your father what it was like setting up his factory in those days? The austerity, the red tape, the strikes. That’s why my parents raised me dreaming about America. Because that’s where you could breathe. That’s where you could innovate…’

‘India was never really socialist, only state owned and corrupt. And don’t tell me you went to the West to innovate. You went to get rich and now you’re back because it is easier here, and you talk like you have come to build your country. How much should I bet that the day the Indian Dream breaks down, you’ll leave again? Look, there are many issues with the welfare state. Still, let us say it is here to stay, and some of my comrades will disagree, but my only request is: be a citizen. Make one land your fate, then you will see.’

If there’s one thing life has taught me, there are no rules at the bottom and the top of the pyramid. Morality is for the middle class. Morality is the middle class’s consolation prize. What else do you have to justify your mediocrity? It soothes you to think all the successful people bribed their way up.

For Gandhi, peace was built into the process. You didn’t compromise people today so you can save them tomorrow. Equality or non-violence wasn’t just the goal. It was the means.’

The Hindu nationalists see the Parsis as ‘guests’, a way to showboat their tolerance by making an example of a numerically insignificant minority. And the Parsis play along; like good guests, they don’t intervene when their hosts squabble. A model minority that prospered under the Mughals and the British, they will continue to do so under the present overlords.

‘I’m not sure there’s nothing out there,’ he says. ‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s pointless speculation. I may have another life and there may be a god, but I’ll never know anything about it. What I’m sure of is that I’m here and want to maximize the trip. That doesn’t include just the taste of Scotch. It includes the big pleasures, like playing all the roles.

But vast democracies, capitalism, the internet and what have you put so much distance between an action and its consequence that it is beyond the imagination of an ordinary man how evil gets amplified. You are insignificant and expanded at once. You are responsible and acted on at once. The questions are too big, the links too foggy, and in the confusion, it seems enough to do well by you and yours, and to let the rest take care of itself … and yet, something had not taken care.