What do we make of disgusting literature? Aesthetic theories of art and ‘good taste’, across various canons of philosophy, often describe disgust as the opposite of beauty, bristling at the suggestion that the two may coexist with any degree of comfort. Little surprise, then, that generations of radical writers — from the Harlem Renaissance to the Dalit Panthers — have used the register of the abhorrent to sharply dismantle social hierarchies imbricated within the feeling.
Ranbir Sidhu’s novel Night in Delhi wastes little time wading into these waters. Following the journey of an unnamed narrator across the Delhi underworld, Sidhu fashions a determinedly bleak landscape replete with sexual exploitation, rolling in the acrid stench of urban crime. And yet, like quite a few Indian novels of the recent past, the author stops just short of offering a specific account of systemic violence. An inexplicable brutality animates the novel’s characters, intangible as the smog that hangs forbiddingly over the capital. Unclear in its intentions and floundering in its execution, there is little that is redemptive or illuminating to the discomfort this novel imparts upon its readers with such abandon.
We learn the narrator of our story works as a petty swindler and sex worker on the streets of Delhi. His lover and pimp is a performer within Delhi’s queer underground. The plot unfolds across twin tracks: the first traces our narrator’s relationship with a series of clients with whom he shares often painful sexual relationships — an American woman working for a fraudulent godman, an academic who creates a programme that can surveil dreams, and the moll of a gangster looking to escape a life of crime. In the other, his day job leads him into a successful career in insurance fraud.
An egregious lack of stakes marks this novel out for much of its two-hundred pages. Our narrator roves around the city from tragedy to tragedy exerting a kind of vacuum over the narrative, hoovering up the attention of a cast of characters whose attraction to him is seldom justified. His motives are unclear, his rage is often sudden — brutal and sadistic on some occasions, and inexplicably righteous on others. In various places, the novel feels almost allergic to specificity.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the treatment of Delhi, a city that reverberates with its own rowdy joy and kaleidoscopic profanity in ways that seem tailor-made for the noir. It is a shame none of it makes its way into the writing which is littered with moody banalities, to wit: A man “smells of the street, of age, and heartbreak and corruption, as if its very essence has found a home inside him”.
There are glimmers of insight in the way Sidhu depicts sex — as possession and domination, the escape valve of repressed masculinity, but these themes are lost in the novel’s nondescript pathos and self-seriousness. The impression is of a musician pulling hard at the same three strings of an electric guitar, pretending to call it hard rock.
Night in Delhi
By Ranbir Sidhu
Westland
pp. 204; Rs 399
