Quarterlife: A Novel

Devika Rege

Pp 420, Rs 599

Two young people have crossed the seas. One to discover a new world. The other for the old world to discover him. In Pune-born and raised Devika Rege’s debut novel, Quarterlife, two separate journeys undertaken from America to India set the stage for an exploration of what politics means for today’s youth. Set in Mumbai, the novel travels through the lives and ideals of a group of friends, all in their twenties, as they try to negotiate the demands of a nation making a new turn.

After spending nearly a decade in America, Naren, a Wharton-educated Indian-American, decides to return home to make a new beginning in India’s commercial capital. At the same time, Amanda, an American, is embarking on a fellowship with an NGO that works in Mumbai’s slums. Both young people know each other and are eager to understand a country that holds different opportunities for them. Naren wants to use his experience in Wall Street to build business investments in the new atmosphere offered by his home country and Amanda hopes to understand a different culture and its people.

Quarterlife’s cast of characters widens with more young people in Mumbai— Naren’s brother Rohit, also an MBA, who has created a production house for films and ads with his friends Gyan and Cyrus. The cast extends to Ifra, who heads Ashray, the NGO that Amanda works with. Also, Omkar, a filmmaker that Rohit wants to rope in for their Black Box’s new venture, and Kedar, the journalist-cousin of Naren and Rohit. It’s a set of characters who will unleash their agendas and ideologies every step of the way. Family relations and friendships will be frayed.

Quarterlife is about the emotions that spill into their path as the group inhabiting disparate worlds of thought encounters each other at work and home. The encounter happens in the backdrop of the victory of the ‘Bharat Party’ and the defeat of the ‘Conclave Party’ that has ruled the country for decades. The Bharat Party and its ideological mentor, the ‘Bharat Brotherhood’, are offering a new direction to the country with their strident nationalism and old values. Rege gathers the yarns of opposing beliefs and ideologies of the country’s youth, at their quarterlife, and weaves a narrative of a nation pulling in many directions.

Naren, called ‘clever little Indian’ by a senior partner at his firm, leaves Wall Street as the Black Lives Matter protests rages in America. Back in Mumbai, where his parents have climbed to the comfort of a luxury apartment after selling their ancestral land in the village to a mining company, he has no qualms in declaring that there are no rules at the bottom and the top of the pyramid. “Morality is the middle class’s consolation prize,” he says, while equating the political with personal.

The novel, which takes the ritualistic ceremony of divisions from the ballot box to the outside and from political parties to the people, takes aim at the roots of schism within society played out by religion, language, caste and history. Rege also revisits the othering in Mumbai decades ago that gave birth to the ‘Marathi Bana’ political party, and the Peshwas of the Konkan region who kept the invaders away. Taking the debates that have disappeared from lawmaking bodies to living rooms, the novel engages its main characters in conversations that are long and intense.

Quarterlife arrives as a rarity in the current Indian art and literary landscape where propaganda often doubles up as creative expression to explore history. The author employs an effective literary tool in having the youth, who have more at stake in the future of the country than the older political stalwarts who decide for them, discuss a present that is more influenced by the past.

Faizal Khan is a freelancer