‘Night in Delhi’ book review: Sex, sleaze and some Shakespeare
Summary
Ranbir Sidhu’s new novel tries too hard to be edgy and risqué at the expense of credibility and nuance in the plot
Ranbir Sidhu’s new novel is told by an unlikely narrator, an unnamed hustler and petty criminal living in Delhi, who spouts Dante and Shakespeare at opportune moments. In fact, the Bard makes an appearance in the oddest of times in the book. Early on in Night in Delhi, Mr Harbans Singh Ahluwalia Esq. (called “The Big Man" by the narrator), who is later revealed to be the mastermind behind a scamming business, decides to call the narrator Ariel and his cross-dressing bar-singer male lover Jaggi, Caliban.
The peculiarity of the meeting between this trio is heightened by the fact that it takes place inside a gurudwara, at the funeral of Singh’s father no less, where the two boys have sneaked in to steal and to eat the meal being served. Although the dead man’s son finds out what the two are up to, he lets them go after extracting a promise from the narrator to meet him the next day, ostensibly for paid sex. As it turns out, there’s more to The Big Man’s plan than just scoring a hooker.
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If willing suspension of disbelief is part of the bargain for reading fiction, readers of this novel will have to go several steps beyond to make peace with the stream of improbable coincidences that make up the story. To begin with Sidhu’s protagonist, who lives in Paharganj, the seedy underbelly of central Delhi, turns on and off multiple personas at will. He is a guinea pig to Anders, a white client, who likes to record his post-coital dreams as part of a project to map the “collective unconscious" of India.
At other times, he loafs around town with Susan, a gullible American woman who is in thrall of a spiritual guru, a tired cliche if there was any, despite Sidhu’s desperate attempts to add interest to her character. Finally, by weeknights, as the narrator clocks in to Singh’s clandestine firm, he puts on an accent and pretends to be an IRS officer to persuade American widows to part with their savings.
In between playing these roles, the narrator is employed as a contract killer, abducted and beaten to an inch of his life, and has an affair with Singh’s right-hand woman, who he names “Beatrice" after Dante’s guide through purgatory to paradise. All along, staggering sums of money change hands. Towards the end, a battered and lost soul, he waxes philosophical. “What if he (Anders) has made me India, the dreams of India?"
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Even if one were to set aside the problems of credibility, it’s difficult to get over the clumsy plotting, especially the many passages of graphic sex and violence trying too hard to be risqué. Almost two decades before Night in Delhi, Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning novel, The White Tiger, had explored related themes of rage and vengeance wrought upon the elite by an underdog through a story that had a sharper edge, even though it wasn’t without its problems of representation. Balram Halwai, the protagonist of Adiga’s morality tale, fought systemic injustices of caste and class to wrest his share of the economic boom in post-liberalisation India. In the process, he behaved unscrupulously, harming his employer, but his villainy wasn’t motivated by greed alone.
In a clever sleight of hand, Sidhu’s novel turns the tables by making the protagonist a former member of society’s elite, whose transformation into a gigolo is linked to his sexual choices. There is, however, little of his back story to make sense of his current predicament, especially in a country where homosexuality was decriminalised a few years back and is no longer an inevitable proxy for the low life of a criminal, especially if you come from a relatively privileged background. Even if you grant that fiction doesn’t necessarily have any intrinsic responsibility to further narratives of social progress, there isn’t enough depth or substance, in Sidhu’s novel to get to where it aspires to reach.
Ranbir Sidhu’s new novel tries too hard to be edgy and risqué at the expense of credibility and nuance in the plot
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