‘Night in Delhi’: An edgy novel about a working-class queer man’s fight to survive

I have been a fan of Ranbir Sidhu’s ever since I read Dark Star. The stream-of-consciousness writing was impeccably styled, the story unravelling with the fluidity and unpredictably of a ball of yarn, bouncing where you didn’t expect it to.

I read Night in Delhi before it was officially published, in preparation for a panel on queer fiction I moderated at the Bangalore Literature Festival. I was afraid – what I was disappointed this time around? Instead, I was charmed, intrigued, riveted, and even disgusted (on the very first page, in the opening lines, a character urinates on the floor of the room he shares with two other men instead of stepping to the nearby bathroom). Sidhu has done it again, or maybe even better this time.

The story of a working-class queer man

There is very little queer fiction in India, especially the kind where queerness is incidental to the plot but central to the character. Night in Delhi is that rare piece of Indian fiction: a novel centring on a working-class queer man. Not an especially ethical or honest one, either: He is a crook, a con artist, an apparently ruthless man. Yet his motivations are easy to sympathise with: He wants to make enough money to go live in a house by the…

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