Mahesh Rao’s third novel tells the story of two young men, Neville and Pavan, as their paths cross and recross in the years preceding India’s 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality. It is a rather melancholy tale, in which the sky is always grey and the mood is always despondent, where secrecy and shame are the prevailing emotions, and violence is never far away. As gay men in pre-2018 India, Neville and Pavan exist in an in-between world. There are dating apps and hookups galore, but there is also open hostility and the threat of prosecution. Tempering this bleakness is Rao’s pleasingly wry humour and sharply satirical eye, which he casts over this period of cultural flux. The narrative is split into two sections – Darjeeling in 2014 and Mumbai in 2018 – proceeding in short chapters that alternate between Neville’s and Pavan’s points of view.
The story begins as a landslide blocks the routes to and from the Golden Peaks Hotel, a subpar establishment in the hills of Darjeeling where Pavan works and where Neville, along with his haughty mother Audrey and servile family friend Lorna, is a guest. With little else to do, and emboldened by the novel circumstances, the two men strike up a furtive romance. “[Pavan’s] sense of the world being held in suspension had continued to grow. The hotel was cut off. Rations were low. Routines had changed. There seemed to be a fated quality about his encounter with Neville.”
Aside from being trapped in a hotel together, though, Neville and Pavan do not seem to have much in common. They come from very different backgrounds. Neville is a workshy college student from a well-heeled Catholic Brahmin family; Pavan is an industrious hospitality worker who has done well to escape his humble beginnings and abusive father. Neville is careless and promiscuous (“darting wherever he could to seek his pleasures”), while Pavan is shy and uptight (“a figure only half in the light”). Differences of race, class, age and sexual experience imbue their relationship with an interesting power dynamic, which over the course of the narrative subtly shifts.
Inevitably, their hotel idyll comes to an end. Perhaps just as inevitably, it is a violent end. The seeds for a possible act of violence are sown early on, with Pavan discovering an abusive term daubed across his workstation (“the angry shade of red, the unstable lines, its sudden appearance, all unsettled him”). Rao successfully establishes an atmosphere freighted with malevolence, where there is a “sense of ugliness in the air”, and where being your true self could be costly. Walking among a group of young men, “Pavan feared that his deviance gave off some odour, that one of them would detect it and the entire group would turn on him”.
Deeply shocked by the incident, the two men separately leave Darjeeling for Mumbai, and resolve to forget all about it, as well as about each other. At this point the narrative shifts gear a little, becoming more diffuse and anecdotal as we follow Neville and Pavan through various trials and tribulations in work and in love. A number of these vignettes are highly enjoyable – Pavan’s excruciating interview for a possible arranged marriage; Neville’s disastrous hookup with an older man – but others are more forgettable. The more affecting hothouse intensity of the first half has been lost, and the connection between the two men made less clear. The plot wanders.
In fact, all together Half Light feels somewhat hazy and unfocused. To some extent this is surely intentional, an approximation of the mental states of two confused young men trying to figure out themselves, and their place in the world. But the lack of a strong narrative thread and the alternating back-and-forth structure leave the reader feeling almost as disoriented as the characters themselves.
That said, there is much to enjoy and much to admire here. Despite its ambivalent tone and unhappy events, the novel does offer a glimmer of hope for a new world that could come into being and, for Pavan at least, new emotions too. What are they? “He could not be sure – but it felt a little like pride.”
• Half Light by Mahesh Rao is published by Pushkin (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
