An epic tale of love across three generations explores changing attitudes towards sexuality in India. S antanu Bhattacharya turned heads with his debut novel One Small Voice , which intertwines the personal fallout after a boy watches a mob burn a Muslim man with a panoramic survey of how modern Indian society is changing — buckling, almost — with the rise of Hindu nationalism as its dominant ideology.
It marked him out as a novelist able to tell the biggest of stories with the most precise and haunting of details. His follow-up, Deviants, is even more ambitious. He has been prompted to record his thoughts by Mambro, who recognises himself in his nephew, and wants to help him navigate life as an out gay man.
But the country has changed sufficiently for Vivaan to be able to go to the school dance with his boyfriend. More notable is how Bhattacharya uses language itself as a motif to signify social and personal change. For Mambro, the discovery of the journal he kept of his relationship with Y triggers ostracism by his university friends, and makes him wary and distant in relationships. It is only towards the end of his story, when a younger Vivaan starts ripping pages from the journal to make into paper boats, that he finds a degree of resolution.
It felt untrue to Vivaan that he could be satisfied by this avatar; for all that he lives his life online, his yearning for palpable human connection is stronger than that. This is a minor complaint. In Deviants, Bhattacharya has written a compelling, concise epic, where politics, love and freedom are balanced and blended into a novel that is unflinching about the cruelties of the past, optimistic about what comes next, but wise enough to know that progress comes with costs, too.
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