HALF LIGHT, subcontinental queerness interrogated pre-decriminalization

HALF LIGHT
MAHESH RAO
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An affair between two men in India changes the course of both their lives forever in this searing queer love story about shame, hope, and identity.

“Rao sheds light without judgement…Thoughtful, tender storytelling at its finest.” —Marie Claire

High up in the misty mountains of Darjeeling, a landslide cuts off a crumbling hillside hotel from the outside world. Trapped together with other guests and staff, two men begin to exchange lingering glances. For Neville, a charismatic student, such encounters are nothing new—urgent kisses in stairwells, fleeting encounters in parked cars. But for Pavan, a shy hotel employee accustomed to hiding in plain sight, their growing connection threatens to upend the careful life he has built in secrecy.

Years later, the men meet again by chance, this time surrounded by the towering skyscrapers and ghostly smog of Mumbai. Neville is now a restless graduate, trying to find his footing in the city. Pavan has long since fled the hills and begun a new life for himself working in a luxurious city hotel. As their renewed flirtation quickly turns fraught, long-buried secrets from their shared past threaten to tumble into the light.

Set on the cusp of India's landmark ruling to decriminalize homosexuality, Half Light is an atmospheric, elegantly wry story of outlawed desire and the fragile hope for a life beyond concealment. From literary powerhouse Mahesh Rao, this tender exploration of the struggle for acceptance and understanding will appeal to readers of Douglas Stuart and Tom Crewe.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: In this year of our lord twenty-twenty six, the World has decided to valorize the ineffable experience of Yearning. Longing purposefully for someone, usually in its most effective iterations someone forbidden to you. I liked Heated Rivalry the book; I adored Heated Rivalry the TV series, because it yearned more obviously for me to invest in, cry over, relate to than in the text version.

I think this story would be even better filmed, too. Its couple aren't as charismatic, or even as much of a couple, as Shane and Ilya; but they have similarly disparate beginnings. Pavan is lower in class, and from a national minority:

𝐏𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐲. 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞, 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐮𝐦 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐟𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. 𝐇𝐞 𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐠𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐬𝐨 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐛𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫. 𝐀𝐭 𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬: 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝-𝐦𝐞-𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐬 𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐞, 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫'𝐬 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐰𝐥𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐬𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝. 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐦𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐥𝐞.

...and Neville is far better educated and insulated from Pavan's existential risks in acting on his gayness, in pre-decriminalization times, by being richer. Not that much happens in the story but they do a lot of soul-searching in gorgeously evoked scenery. They are existing as gay in a country with even farther to go towards QUILTBAG equality than the US.

It makes their interest in each other more difficult, of course, and it sharpens their desire to be in relationship. It's very much a story that foregrounds their interiority, which makes me feel the Yearn all the more. It is not a romance, though, don't hear me tell you that! It's a story of two gay guys who notice each other and wonder, separately, if it's even okay to yearn for the lovingkindness they see and can imagine in each other. Neville is able to shut down the desire for more by seeking casual sex with nobody-bodies. Pavan is more constrained in his sexual expression without the money and class position; their ideas of each other are thus similar: I can't get what I want but I want what I thought I had with him.

It's powerful, the yearning, it's cruel in the extreme to criminalize a person's identity over something as trivial as sexuality, and Author Rao doesn't let us forget the men's struggles are not simple or internally resolvable. I'll be honest: I didn't like either man much. I was never rooting for them to get past their fears and be together. I was fully invested in their yearning, for a just and fair world, for a life they could feel validated them as men, for a way to seek someone who loves them for themselves and they might love in return. Their differing repressive forces are equally unfair. Their ultimate fates aren't vouchsafed to us, exactly, but decriminalization does push Pavan into making some steps into a future under his control. Neville is a rich boy from start to finish, not inclined to be otherwise, so his course is merely more openly itself.

I had to take a star off the beautifully evocative rale set in vividly realized places because the men were so constructed as to make their didactic positions as catalysts for Pavan's growth and Neville's stasis their only real relationship. It makes the experience of reading Neville's arc feel as though I was voyeurizing vapidity. On the whole, though, I found so much enjoyment in the settings and societal developments feeling so real to me that I hope you'll send a copy to your local filmmaker!

THE OTHER MAN, a Lammy-nominated gay-male romance set in Mumbai

THE OTHER MAN
FARHAD J. DADYBURJOR
Lake Union Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Real Rating: 4.25* of five, because I feel charitable despite getting NINE W-BOMBS splattered on my hems like chamberpots tossed out a medieval window

FINALIST FOR THE 34th LAMMY AWARD—BEST GAY ROMANCE! Winners announced 11 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: A heartwarming and transporting romantic comedy about finding happy ever after on your own terms.

Heir to his father’s Mumbai business empire, Ved Mehra has money, looks, and status. He is also living as a closeted gay man. Thirty-eight, lonely, still reeling from a breakup, and under pressure from his exasperated mother, Ved agrees to an arranged marriage. He regrettably now faces a doomed future with the perfectly lovely Disha Kapoor.

Then Ved’s world is turned upside down when he meets Carlos Silva, an American on a business trip in India.

As preparations for his wedding get into full swing, Ved finds himself drawn into a relationship he could never have imagined―and ready to take a bold step. Ved is ready to embrace who he is and declare his true feelings regardless of family expectations and staunch traditions. But with his engagement party just days away, and with so much at risk, Ved will have to fight for what he wants―if it’s not too late to get it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is nothing quite so satisfying to me as to read something where, since the conventions of the genre are well-established and I'm deeply familiar with them, the Rules get a good, solid workout. It really looked like something was just going to happen in the established and expected (in the book's world) way, and I'd've been reading a different book than the one I thought I was getting.

This did not occur. That is a Good Thing.

There's always an HEA (Happily Ever After) in a romance novel, or in a rom-com. They aren't always clearly signaled from the beginning. Usually, after a long time reading them, one gets a feeling for what's coming up. The thing that makes this a better version of the genres (they're not identical, romances and rom-coms) is that I got the real and genuine interiority of the main man.

He was well aware how people viewed homosexuality in this country—as if it were a disease that could be cured like any other. He would become the object of ridicule at work, and he could imagine all too easily the way Mum’s friends would sneer about his “abnormality” behind his back, offering their sympathies to Dolly while secretly relishing the downfall of the once-mighty Mehra name.
–and–
Carlos clearly believed Ved was different, but Ved wasn’t so sure. Ved had once been the one to smile at Akshay like that, with his whole face open, with such trust. Ved had done that from this very seat at this very table. Now, the roles were reversed. In this scenario, Ved was Akshay. And that terrified him.

The point-of-view character is, in the best versions of the genres, developed beyond the absolute minimum. In Dadyburjor's book, the repeal of Section 377, a British Colonial law against consensual gay sex between men, provides the backdrop for the gradual awakening of the main man to his responsibilities as a societal actor. His long-brewing confrontation with himself, his internalized need to Please and to fit in, tracks with the Indian Supreme Court's decision to overturn this legacy of obtuse and cruel Britishness. This places the book's action as taking place around 6 September 2018, when the decision to strike down the law was formally issued.

As framing devices for coming-out narratives go, it's awfully hard to beat that one! It isn't exactly harped on, American audiences without much interest in the fate of their fellow men in other countries aren't going to get smacked with it everywhere, but there is enough to make the turning points clear to someone who has paid attention.

Ved, our main man, is really the opposite of a cinnamon roll...maybe a kale salad, like the one he eats *convulsive retch* during the dark, pre-coming-out days?...he not only deserves his suffering but is let off lightly by the author for his unconscionable acts of lying by omission and commission. He's eaten alive by self-loathing and guilt? Good! He merits these feelings! His actions towards both his gal-pal/fiancée and his belovè'd Carlos are reprehensible indeed. Yes yes yes he's trying to please everyone else and not being in the least bit honest in it. That's part of the character's journey...and part of the framing device's demands. The point of Ved coming out at all was to be, legally and finally, a gay man in a country that stopped making it possible for sleazy, evil people to victimize him. (Go watch the 1961 film Victim if you want to see what specifically could happen to a man like Ved without the repeal of Section 377. It is not all that pleasant, he said with his best clipped English tones.)

But this is all in service of A Redemption. The redemption comes after the main man is out, after he takes his lumps and makes his obeisances to the ones his dishonesty hurt. It does indeed work, for this particular reader, as a romance novel for that reason. I wouldn't call it a rom-com, as I've seen others do. I don't find lying and hiding amusing anymore...once I might've, since I used to laugh my socks off at Absolutely Fabulous (am now unable to watch even a full episode).

Ved makes as good as anyone can for the harm he's caused. That merits some sort of reward. But we don't see it...the engagement party that he's just caused to crash and burn was a few days, like two or three!, away when he said "NO" and we see NONE of the carnage? Why do I feel so cheated of some good, meaty melodrama? And Disha, the woman he was engaged to, wasn't any monadnock of probity, either, yet she gets nothing, absolutely nothing! of a reckoning for her lying? Hm. I get the constraints of romance-novel length but a balance could've been struck, couldn't it?

So no, no fives from me. But I must say that I completely understand the inclusion of the book on the Lammy Awards list of bests of 2021. It deserves, in my never-remotely-humble opinion, the win. The originality of the framing device, its careful use so as not to be intrusive to audiences who *sigh* just don't care but still present enough to make the timeline clear, gets big kudos. The main man's journey from child-man to man is satisfyingly real. The ending is indeed happy, and that was exactly what the entire exercise promised.

Promise: kept. Pleasure: had.

SALVAGE, Alexandra Duncan's cli-fic/feminist/SF/dystopian door-stopper of a good read

SALVAGE
ALEXANDRA DUNCAN (Salvage #1)
Greenwillow Books
$17.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Ava, a teenage girl living aboard the male-dominated, conservative deep space merchant ship Parastrata, faces betrayal, banishment, and death. Taking her fate into her own hands, she flees to the Gyre, a floating continent of garbage and scrap in the Pacific Ocean.

I think that's pretty damn skimpy, so here's the flap copy as well:

Her life is a shadow of a life. Her future is not her own to fashion. Her family is a tangle of secrets. She cannot read. She cannot write.

But she is Parastrata Ava, the Captain's eldest daughter, the so girl of a long-range crew—her obligations are grave and many.

And when she makes a mistake, in a fragrant orchard of lemons, the consequences are deaadly.

There are some who would say, There but for the Mercies go I.

There are some who would say Parastrata Ava is just a silly earthstruck girl who got what was coming to her.

But they don't know the half of it.

My Review: Well now, wasn't this a long damn book. Luckily I liked it, so it wasn't a looooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnggggg damn book.

Feminist dystopian SF as a category description doesn't get me in a lather of urgency to read a book. It might be more likely to lather me up now, since Duncan's gift for poetical description is deployed to create such a series of parallel worlds. The Crewe of Parastrata, Ava's birthplace and homeland, are misogynistic patriarchal violence addicts. The strange society of the Gyre, where Ava finds lovingkindness, is worthy of an entire book of its own. The horrifying megamega-megalopolis of Mumbai, 170 MILLION strong, made me claustrophobic, and the modren tecknowledgee was more like what we'll have in 2020 than futuristic...my one big complaint.

But listen, if your Firefly love was at least partly rooted in its unique linguistic take on the future (if you DIDN'T love Firefly you wouldn't be my friend and therefore shouldn't be bothered by reading this review), this book will scratch the bump left by its short life. Like Firefly as well is the more-or-less libertarian bent of this book's worlds. It's completely impossible to closely govern a dense population the size of Mumbai, no matter how high your tech.

The pleasures of reading lovely sentences are sometimes lessened by those sentences serving a slow-paced story. For my part I found the leisurely pace of the novel added to my sense of getting to know the worlds Duncan was giving me in some depth. Some things still managed to get sprung on me. I found Ava's about-face from Obedient Girl to Power Ranger a bit unfounded, for example. But in the end, it was a small cavil in the larger picture of empowerment and growth.

In my quest never to ossify above the neck, I choose a genre to read a book in that I normally avoid like it gots the cooties. YA is one of those genres for me. This YA novel was a pleasant surprise, and it contained a message that I would very much like any teenaged girl in today's world to receive. No one will empower you. Empower yourself and refuse to listen to "no."