Time for another book review! I just finished reading Devika Rege’s Quarterlife, a delightful romp through the world of the English educated elite of Bombay. Readers familiar with post Independence Indian writing will know well this class of people immortalized as they were in fiction by Salman Rushdie.
Midnight’s Children was Salman Rushdie’s coming of age masterpiece, taking a satirical look at the generation of this elite that was born when India attained Independence i.e. midnight of August 14th, 1947 (hence ‘Midnight’s Children’.) If this was the boomer generation, then in Quarterlife Devika Rege takes on the challenge of the last of the Millennials and the first of Gen Z as they enter into proper adulthood.
Disclaimer - I am of that elite too so I know it well. After Independence the Boomer generation took charge replacing the British elites. Educated, cosmopolitan, they contributed much and also maintained something of an unofficial status quo. Their Gen X children were raised in privilege and (often)wealth, went abroad to study and carried a sense of being special, of being one of the lucky few to be a part of this privileged elite, while the rest of India struggled with its poor knowledge of English as well as its lack of opportunities.
Bombay itself developed a very unique hybrid culture in which drink, art, travel, salons, parties, sports clubs and fashion all came together. It all felt grand and glorious, except for the nagging fear underneath, so beautifully captured in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, just how long can this last? The old India outside of the British educated elite is bound to assert itself and it rightly should too, so went the thinking, but how will we fit in this India to come? Will we still have our place or will the rising tide of the other classes sweep us away?
One solution to this fear was to hold onto optionality. Get a residency permit for a Western country - that is your ticket out in case things get too hot here. UK was the preferred choice initially and then it became America. Or just become an NRI(non-resident Indian). Stay abroad and come back every year to visit with family and friends.
Fast forward a generation and a half and we get to world of Quarterlife, filled with younger millennials and older Gen Z of this elite group ie. those in their late twenties and early thirties. When the story begins we get to meet a few of them - the Chitpavan Brahmin brothers Nareen and Rohit and their cousin Kedar, the Parsees Gyan and Cyrus, Irfa, the Muslim girl, all raised in Bombay, more comfortable speaking in English than their mother tongue, all with cosmopolitan, global aspirations.
Moor’s Last Sigh was a very pessimistic book. In it the protagonist had to pull his escape lever when India got too much. He wound up alone in Spain. However, thirty years later, India is still chugging along and the English speaking elite are still around and doing well. The dire prediction that Salman Rushdie made has not come to pass. The old India has very much asserted itself, but the old elite has not been swallowed up and destroyed.
As we can see as the stories of our main characters unfold, accommodations have been made. Both, the old India and the old English speaking elite have made room for each other. In the meantime the business of building a modern civilization is proceeding at pace. India is growing furiously and getting rich. Or at least some parts of it are.
So much so that many of this western educated elite are choosing to stay in India to build their careers, or return from the US to India to do the same, and our principal characters reflect this new rite of passage. They are also remarkably self-aware. The old learn-by-rote education system and ritualized ancient life seems to have given way to at least some individual development. All the characters have the awareness to ask of themselves who they are and what they want of their lives; to discover their own personal ambitions.
Around 1991, at the time Moor’s Last Sigh came out, V.S Naipaul’s final travelogue on India, ‘A Million Mutinies Now’ also hit the bookshelves. Naipaul travelled the length and breadth of India to record these million mutinies happening all over the country. After centuries of civilizational defeat, people all over were throwing off the ritualized life and taking charge of their own lives.
Now the children of this generation of mutineers have come of age and are reaping the benefits of this freedom their parents claimed and passed on. Nareen has given up his Wall Street life/high finance American life and has come back to do the same in India. His younger more mercurial brother has started his own film business. Irfa runs a high profile non-profit that is focussed on education in one of Mumbai’s largest slums. Gyan works with Rohit. Cyrus has recently come out to his parents.
Throw in two outsiders and we have a group ripe for cocktail fueled self discovery jam sessions. Amanda, an old friend of Nareen, arrives from America to work an internship at the non-profit and starts an affair with Rohit. Rohit is attracted to the film work of Omkar, a boy from the rural heartland, that other India, and wants to sponsor his work on the Ganesh festival. They strike up an uneasy friendship.
The characters are well crafted if a little too self-aware for their age, and Devika oscillates between describing their inner life in the first and third person, which can be a bit jarring at times. Nevertheless, the conflicts are well setup - the racial tension created by Amanda’s presence, the class conflict that prevents Rohit and Omkar’s friendship from going too deep, the tension between Nareen’s acceptance of India’s capitalist development path and Kedar’s idealistic critique of the wreckage it leaves in its wake.
The age old anxiety of the English speaking elite, that Bombay as they know it will get swallowed up is still there, but this time mostly expressed by Irfa, who worries that she and her kind will get eaten up by the old Hindu India asserting itself. Cyrus continues to live an uneasy life in a culture that hasn’t fully accepted his lifestyle.
The Ganesh festival, as it did in Moors Last Sigh, serves as the backdrop to highlight all these conflicts. Everything comes to a head on the day of the ‘Visarjan’, when thousands upon thousands gather to cast their Ganesh idols into the sea, praying that the Lord Remover of Obstacles will return the next year and the city of Bombay turns into a huge party.
Much danger lurks at the edges of this party - when the Ganesh processions pass through Muslim neighborhoods for instance, or when the drunken revelers lose control and Amanda is assaulted. However the damage remains at the edges. The center holds, there are no major riots. Enough of the powers that be, whether they be the old Hindu India asserting itself, or the old English educated elite plunging into the new Indian growth story and making lots of money from it, or even the Mullah of the Muslim neighborhood who places a garland on the Ganesh statue as a gesture of friendship, would prefer the status quo rather than any big upheaval.
For there is money to be made and lives to be lived with this new money! So should we not make accommodations? After all is not quarter-life a time to make these accommodations? To know our interests and strengths, to know what the world requires and make the adjustments to find our place and get busy living?
That then is the surprisingly optimistic, heart warming message of Quarterlife, that as India grows it is learning how to make these accommodations. The only character who fares badly is Kedar who insists on purity and perishes for it.
However, just like Moor’s Last Sigh, we do have one character who pulls their escape lever. Irfa, the muslim girl, afraid for herself, escapes away to Dubai, heartbroken at the loss of the Bombay she knew. Her’s would be a worthy story to write for a sequel. Could she, a Bombay girl find any belonging or happiness in Dubai? Very unlikely - she would have to make lots of accommodations there too. Would she and the India she is fleeing be able to make the accommodations to co-exist so she would come back? It is hard to predict the future but I rather suspect so.
Quarterlife ends rather abruptly, like the author lost steam to continue. For the last chapter she surprisingly switches to the personal voice, exiting out of the novel space altogether. Instead she talks about her trip to Varanasi to honor her atheist, secular father’s surprising final wish, that his ashes be scattered in the Ganges at Varanasi. Why would he want this? She goes to Varanasi to try to figure it out. In the process she too seems to be figuring out the accommodations she needs to make to find her place in this new India.
All in all this is a fabulous book, and in her depictions of the curious bubble world of Bombay elite, I find Devika Rege to be a worthy successor to Salman Rushdie. I can also see parallels with Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being in this novel. All these characters searching for themselves to find that sweet spot, when all questions have fallen away and you are simply a wheel rolling of its own motion, light as a feather, in full flow. Don’t we all want that?