9.15 What Comes After Coming Out? ft. Rahul Singh

What do you do when the person you love wants something you're not sure you can give?

In this episode of Books & Beyond, Tara speaks with Rahul Singh, debut novelist and academic, about his book Unfolding, which follows two gay men navigating a long-term relationship where their expectations of love begin to diverge.

The conversation moves through the emotional complexity of open relationships, and how the book holds space for desire without rushing to label or judge it. They also discuss the novel’s domestic world, where much of the story unfolds inside the home, and how class and gender shape the characters’ lives and choices.

Rahul also shares the unusual journey of writing the book without a publishing contract, across multiple drafts and years of uncertainty, all while his parents still don’t know what the novel is really about.

If you’ve ever struggled to stay on the same page in love, this one will stay with you.

Books Mentioned in the Episode:

1. Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar
2. Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai
3. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms. 

Transcript

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What can I expect from others, I haven't even, I couldn't even show the cover to my parents you know it was so awkward so I had to just quickly just say, look my book's out it's a story about these two men who are just friends, I had to lie this to them. Hi everyone, so if you've ever been in what we now call a situationship or watched a friend go through this where you know one person wants something and the other person isn't quite there this episode is for you because I'm sure when I'm receiving this at least one person has popped into your head so you know what to do send this their way, don't forget to hit the follow button. So today's episode is about a debut novel which is called Unfolding by Rahul Singh, he's an academic and a writer whose work has appeared in publications like Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Literature, Folk Literature and it's very hard to believe that this is a debut novel because I really love the way it was written, it was very very smooth writing and the book follows the life of Ralph and Ojas, they are a couple in their 30s and they're living in Calcutta and Ralph is really you know looking for stability right now but Ojas, he wants to open up their relationship and that is where the story starts and the story isn't just limited to you know their relationship because interspersed with their story is the story of Zubina who is Ralph's house help and she obviously you know lives a completely different life, she has a different marriage and one day she walks in on Ralph and Ojas together and seeing them in love like that it just opens up something different in her life and makes her question her marriage and her relationship so I really like you know how differently love was portrayed, how you know you explore things like open relationship and also how universal all these emotions are like loneliness and you know wanting to belong so I'm very excited to talk about this with you. Thank you so much for having me, I'm very excited to be in conversation with you. Let's start with you know the main characters who are Ralph and Ojas because they're really at the heart of this novel, Ralph is a pastry chef and he's a loving mama's boy who misses the loss of his mother and Ojas is this you know dependable son and he's taken over his family business but he's not even he's not come out yet to his family and they have this beautiful relationship and Ojas kind of says you know one day I want to open this up so what drew you to this kind of dynamic between them and what did you want to explore with this concept of open relationships? So thank you for starting up with this question, very complicated question so the thing with this was it's of course started with when the novel the idea for the novel came to me and that I wanted to write something it started with this situation where these two men are there and they're struggling to be together and this spurred on since 2019 I've been thinking of it and in 2020 I basically started to write it so the reason why this imagination came was because when I was reading at the time I would read about mostly about homosexual narratives or queer stories especially when gay men are involved most of the stories would be limited to the identity crisis they're going through or the idea of coming out or being in a marriage but you know have being homosexual outside the marriage so not that these narratives are not important it's just that I felt maybe we need something more we need to explore what it is when there are just two men being together and they're struggling to be together what kind of relationship do they share what is the dynamic between them and I think that is when this idea came that I'm going to move beyond these basic growing up narratives as gay because I wanted to explore two adult men in their 30s who have had some reconciliation some reckoning with their identity as gay men and now how are they negotiating their everyday lives with this identity that was something that was at the heart of my curiosity with the novel and with the character and that is where these two men started to appear and there I started to follow them pursue them you know look into their lives how are they dealing with it so I think that is where the beginning and I also wanted to think about what are these novel dynamics that we are observing in today's relationship and a romantic relationship what is happening to notions of romance in contemporary times with you know these new kinds of definition being added to relationship how is it how is it impinging and impacting and and still how is this idea of love being I don't know restored or still reproduced again and again so I wanted to see and be curious about that as well so yeah I think that's from this is a moral level of curiosity from which this investigation began and the story for these two characters began I also really like that and uh you know and there's one scene where your characters are watching Schitt's Creek and I think a lot of people really love that too because it does exactly what you say right it just talks about a love story between two gay men it doesn't have to be all about coming out identity not all those stories have to be the same and it reminded me of another thing you know like when people talk about immigrants immigrant stories it's all just like a similar narrative you know that struggle and all of those things but uh just having characters already immigrants doing their own thing makes such a big difference to also just normalise these kind of stories more and more in our society so yeah how did how did fiction come into the picture for you so I was never trained in writing as such I never did a degree in literature I am uh I did a degree in sociology I'm currently finishing my PhD in sociology but I was always reading literature and there was in as part of writing as well I would write short stories here and there ever since I was a kid and I think uh in 2019 I started thinking about uh writing and not as as in thinking about a career in writing but simply just writing I started writing short stories I started writing of this the first three chapters of a novel which I abandoned because it was horrible because I thought I was writing about myself then I realised I don't want to write about myself I can't write about myself so because I'm also trained in a discipline that's largely orientated towards the other because in sociology anthropology we tend to study the other other community other people so and that is problematic it has its own problems but then maybe that is what uh spurred me into thinking about what if I start writing stories that's not about myself but about other people and I think that is where uh wanting to write emerged and you know with 2020 the pandemic and my entire uh student life coming to a standstill and I was reading more and at that time uh you know I also started to write but again as I said I didn't write the novel with the idea that okay someday this will be out into the world I just wrote it because it was somewhere there that this story could be possible so as I kept writing it and rewriting it and it went on for one draft the second draft the third draft I didn't realise that maybe this this could be out into the world I think that's how it very organically gradually took place that's really cool I like that you started writing it out without an audience in mind because oftentimes you know that you'd sort of not have a filter and you might produce better work as well um so I really like the moment in the book where the house helps Obeena sees Dalf and Ojas in bed and it reminded me of you know that scene in where the maid sees Shahrukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan's characters and she loses it but her Zubina's reaction doesn't come from a place of judgement or homophobia she is seeing something that she doesn't have the language or framework to understand she doesn't really get what she's trying to see what she's seeing and she tries to make sense of it in her own way so tell me a little bit more about you know Zubina's character and why you introduced her and um you know this moment in the book yeah so uh as I said when I started to think about the book I started with particularly Ralph and Ojas and then I started to think that okay let's say this is happening with Ralph and Ojas and they stay in a flat and then I was thinking about the logistics of Ralph living there then I thought of course if Ralph lives there there will be someone to help around the house there's a help required because that's how structurally the thing is that even though men who can cook they eat their homes they don't cook generally there is a cook who cooks and you know does the work around the house and and because of the location because so everything in the novel is very it's I have thought through everything but this could be because of my training within the discipline the urban studies as well because the place they are in so Tangra they live in and you know opposite Tangra there is the very large Muslim slum neighbourhood in Calcutta called Topsia that's where Zubina comes from so geographically also it was very much structured and the chapter structuring was also done done that way so that one you observe here and the other there and and and so Zubina came to me through that and then I said then I thought let Zubina let the first scene of the novel be the Zubina let the first chapter of the novel be about Zubina discovering them and she's discovering them without any judgement because she just doesn't understand what what she's watching and and I wanted to I wanted her to be there also because I wanted to also look at Ralph and Otis from the larger perspective of the outside world the heterosexual world and thereby for the world to be curious about this equation the way Zubina is but at the same time I did not want to make Zubina only only a watcher I also wanted her I wanted to discover her character I want to see what she's up to what is going back what is she going to do with this thought that she just watched back at her home does it linger or is she just dismissing it is she ignoring it or does it stay with her and if it stays with her what are the different ways it's staying with her maybe it's staying with her when she's looking at you know two men holding hands and walking maybe it's staying with her when she imagines Aadil being intimate to her or you know expressing something to her or maybe it stays with her when she's simply just lying down and you know having a very weird dream right so I wanted to explore these different ways because how a memory also stays with you it happens it doesn't happen that you keep thinking about it all day it's like these residues that keep sprinkling occurring in your mind you know at very moments that you don't want it to you want to think about other things but that just comes hits you and then it leaves you and then what what does it matter because I wanted this to happen with Zubina I wanted her to also be a person who thinks because you know generally I've seen whenever a woman from working class especially slums have been portrayed they are portrayed as though they are they are thoughtless beings or the only thing that they are about is their poverty the only thing they think is about money of course that's a very important thing about money but what are the other ways in which we can imagine their lives I wanted to think about and I think for this my training in my discipline uh uh has really been helpful because then I was able to actually bring out the nuances in Zubina's life the different things that are constantly taking her bringing her together taking her apart so these other these are this is how I came to discover and come into close contact with the character and Zubina yeah and one of the moments that I really liked in the book was when she catches her daughters playing this game called home you know house house everybody plays house house when they're kid and it was very fascinating because when they're playing house what they do is that they you know serve their husband they pretend to be serving the husband's dinner then they pretend to put their daughters to sleep and then they say okay the daughters are asleep and then one of the girls climbs on top of the others and they disseminate sex because they're living in such close quarters and this is what they've seen that their parents are doing you know and I just struck me so much that you know that's something very private is being witnessed and we're growing up with privilege and things like that we have that sense of privacy and personal space and yeah Zubina is very scandalised when she yeah and I wanted to I wanted to bring that moment because I also wanted to bring talk about the idea of the urban space that how one is inhabiting the city it's never the same so see how Ralph and Notius are continuously inhabiting the urban space and how their Zubina and her family are never the same because of the class identity because of the gendered identity how one actually imagines and lives in the city also changes that the city doesn't isn't the same experience for each and every one that it does change how you experience the city its infrastructures the idea of the space in the city even or even the idea of the domesticity it's always going to be relative to the particular identity to particular class and gender identity that you belong to and this is something that I was very conscious as I was doing as I was moving on to the second and the third draft because in the first draft I was not that conscious about these things I just wanted to first have the story because I did not when I started I do not have an end in mind I just know that the stories this is what I want to do let's see how far I can take it it was in my second third draft where I started to pay attention to these finer nuances and threads that could be explored through these characters yeah and another character that I really enjoyed is Ojas because he is very different from Ralph and he's very different of course from Zubina's background because he is this Marwadi you know from a conservative family they have a family business textile and the parents want him to get married he's 39 years old he's not come out to his parents and now he's wanting an open relationship so tell me a little bit more about I found this character very interesting tell me a little bit more about Ojas. Thank you so much because I really wanted someone to actually also find Ojas interesting because in many ways Ralph and Zubina become these very central characters and Ojas tends to become like this sort of a quote-unquote villain that he wants to break the relationship and not to have romance with Ralph singularly but it's actually Ojas was a very I wanted to really bring him out as a character who has grown up being extremely radicalised in his mind because ever since because I trace certain past his memories when he was young it's not that he has lived a life where he has continuously been constrained and he has had to repress himself his only repression has occurred in relation to his parents and and in the other aspects of his life Ojas has been very radicalised he has been going on dates since the early 2000s and he has experimented explored a lot with his life and now that he's reaching almost 40 he's also coming to terms that he should have his life together and that is also something I want to explore because how when an individual starts to reach you know towards the end of 30s it's that everything all directions are going to have to stop you need to move in one direction you need to stop you need to now be stable this is the idea of stability and this is something I wanted to actually also undo because who is the stability for because most gay men don't get this right they're living in a country where the idea that marriage could give stability is not the case here because there's no legal marriage that's going to take place right here the idea of stability and how gay men deal with stability and you know this these ideas of ageing is always different right because even men they don't age in the same way that other men do so say for heterosexual men the how they age and their engagement with the family is very different from say how say gay men are engaging and ageing with the family because here is Ojas who still is single he still lives with his family and there is constantly a negotiation with silence in the household he's not talking to them openly and they're going on forcing him they have no sense of his they're continuously trying to emotionally manipulate him force themselves on him and he's trying to move away so I also wanted to explore how do gay men negotiate because you know the struggle doesn't end after you become economically independent it seems as though once you're economically independent you're free from the family ties you know you are your own being but I wanted to show how for gay men especially those who continue to live with their family the struggle is always going to be ongoing it never really ends it always keeps taking place and this is something that I wanted to bring through this character and also because of his ethnic identity as Marwari there's a very different uh way in which he's perceiving his family's he deals with the idea because you know he's a migrant his family has been there constantly they have to prove themselves why they belong here let's say Ralph may not happen because Ralph has is a Bengali Christian always being there so I also wanted to bring out this that how they're from two different communities and how not in a very blatant manner but very subtle manners the things the way they proceed and the way they think about their own lives uh it changes and I found myself wondering you know because I mean I know so many people who come from you know these conservative families as well and I wonder I just wondered would you think he'd ever come out to his parents you know because I their parents won't have a good reaction to it and I think you showed that and how he grapples with that and maybe that's one of the reasons why he wants this open relationship uh with Ralph right because that prospect of committing to one person means getting in your family and all of these other things which maybe he's not able to do at the moment whereas Ralph you know there's a scene with him and his father and his father said I'm okay if you guys come and live with me which is radically different uh in terms of you know yeah exactly thank you for observing that that's that's such a an astute observation I really like that I want to dig deeper into the concept of open relationship because it seems you know even there's a parallel story where Ralph's best friend he also his wife wants an open relationship you know and he's completely averse to it and uh you know so tell me and obviously we see what this does to Ralph it triggers all sorts of jealousy in him it makes him very insecure uh even though he participates in it you know but it's almost like out of revenge than actually wanting to be in it so tell me about like these kind of relationships and uh what effect did it have on Ralph and what did he want to show through it yeah so first of all Sujo isn't married so it's not his wife it's his girlfriend still uh so that that is them so yeah this is something that I wanted to uh bring and talk about because uh so generally there has been a sense that only in homosexual relationships are these very polyamorous and open relationship and these new novel dynamics they are coming through this queer relationships so I wanted to also bring Sujo as one as a foil and thereby contrast the two experiences and also talk about how for straight people because the world is really so much for straight people it caters so much for the heterosexual it's easier to get in and thereby get out as well because you know you have and there's this moment in a part two with the chapter where they are going to a morn Sujo, Ojas and Ralph and Sujo is talking to his girlfriend over the phone and they're watching him and they have this very poignant experience that how the world arranges itself for Sujo but not for say Ralph and Ojas and I wanted to that was a very very poignant moment uh to write as well because you know that this is what largely uh homosexuals queer community lacks this this space where the world is working for you and here is the man for whom the world will work in order for him to get married and then have a children and then keep the cycle continuing which is not the case now coming to the open relationship uh so I knew that I wanted to work with this concept in uh to Ralph first and I also wanted to show that uh how the idea of an open relationship is you know it requires certain kind of a readiness on partners and and I and throughout the novel you see I as an author make no judgement whether open relationship is good or bad uh in no way is there a judgement that Ralph is good and Ojas is bad because Ojas wants open relationship this I entirely leave it to the I my role as a writer is to to show how an open relationship actually isn't working here because the partners are have two very different expectations from a relationship from their togetherness and thereby it's going to crash and continuously I build on the suspense whether it's going to crash whether it's going to crash are they going to fall apart are they going to fall apart so you know this this this hype this tension I've been trying to stretch for the novel it's very difficult you know because you can stretch it for a certain time but for an entire novel to keep stretching it and then to come to a particular decision and that too in this short period of time because the entire novel occurs only from summer till November and that's where the stretch of the time of the novel is and there are a lot of past coming in between so I wanted to explore this without making really a statement on what is the authors because I feel in the space of a novel I want to simply explore the problem there and how are the characters negotiated and that is the thing I never make Ojas a villain throughout the narrative right no at no point do I say that Ojas is wrong because he thinks to open the relationship because you know that will again reproduce what is the ideal of monogamy because thereby when you say the ideal is monogamy then you're actually judging open relationship or non-monogamous relationship so I wanted to steer clear as an author on this particular topic and that I wanted to only see through the characters and for Ralph of course for him it's a it's not the ideal situation he doesn't want it he doesn't think that this will this is making him happy anymore and and I was trying to show to Ralph and Ojas both because how expectations when they start varying in a relationship can actually it requires a more kind of a very equal dialogue rather than a constant tussle and competition because throughout the novel these these are two men constantly engaging in power battles and this is also something that I was trying to bring about because you see most of the novels when we read when there is a heterosexual pair we are looking at there is always a male and a female and structurally women are seen as powerless men are seen as powerful and thereby you get a sense of how the power dynamic works but in this novel I wanted to show how will the power dynamic work if there are two men struggling because these are two men and they are fighting they are constantly fighting having conflicts what resolution does the conflict eventually lead to because you know the communication between them leads to emotional physical different kinds of conflict arise because of this open relationship and and that's the thing with this open relationship I never wanted to make a statement whether it's good or bad I wanted to simply explore what is it doing to these two characters and I think I did as much justice as I could with it. I like what you said that there's no sort of like stereotypical roles even within the relationship yeah I found that to be true as well because they're both sort of you know doing really well successful in their own right have their own lives their own family friends all of that stuff and there's this power battle and I really like the whole idea of how you constructed space in this novel so you have obviously the city of Calcutta which you've spoken about and your sociology you know training has helped you create the space that Zubina lives in how the neighbours interact but I love Ralph's apartment because that is the space because the outside world as you said is not conducive to the relationship they can't go out and they can't be holding hands or showing any PDA or just you know things that heterosexual couples are able to do but their apartment is that safe space where you know they're together they're intimate they're cooking they're watching shows tell me about that space yeah thank you for asking that question because I also really enjoyed writing about their apartment and the domestic spaces of that I was trying to create throughout the novel because so much of domesticity is attributed to women and that it's the woman's domain domestic the home and all the activities relating to the domestic for a very long time and even in novels even in books it's as though the domesticity is only attributed to the woman and I wanted to do that differently here because I wanted to show that how do men become domestic how do they imagine space and there is this constant you know thing in Ralph he wants a separate house he wants to be away from his father and he wants to have his own domestic space and it's and he he knows how to organise keep the space better and I and that's where most of the novel uh occurs in that house in that space there are very few moments where they're actually outside the words earlier in fact in the very first or second draft uh the editor said that they need to do more than just be home you know these and so I have to really something really push them outside the home so imagine like cafes they're going in or in a mall or in some party because I because half the novel they said it's most of the novel for Ralph is just at his home that's occurring either it is the home in Tamil Nadu home in Alipore so so that's why I had to also push them out a little bit outside the home spaces but actually I wanted to centre it in the home because uh I wanted to see what it is for two men to just be within a domestic space because you know so much of movies and films and you know uh books that I have read where gay men are constantly outside because you see the home the domestic space is such a threatening space that the parents and gaze always on you with other people always like always hovering around you like say this novel called Kobalt Blue also it really showed the home as such a by Sachin Kundalkar uh I think the book is yeah it really showed home as such a threatening space for the for this man and it's the same went with I think that other boy the other novel called Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai again the home and the people around it became sort of threatening space so all the time whenever I have read say queer novels queer narratives for a long time we have seen home as a very threatening space for homosexual characters and for men especially uh so I wanted to think about what would it mean if I tried to write about home as the only safe space and yeah this is the home for Ralph and Otis both where they can exercise their everyday life their right and you know and and deal with objects around them in such in a manner that that reveals them more and more and that is not continuously out there to you know tell them that they do not belong there and for me this domesticity this idea of domesticity and especially the exploring it through men became very interesting and and I wanted to pursue it push it further and and thereby I I was really I too was enjoying uh exploring the home space exploring this domestic space exploring these everyday activities that they're engaging in and how it is also revealing who they are as people as characters you know things about uh the way you know when I talk about the chairs being scattered on a table coffee table lying in a very haphazard manner and you know fingerprints of uh on a on a only self-help kind of a book that is there and you know and Ralph being a person who really cooks and bakes becomes very much important more immersed in this space right and then I have who is sent who's trying to be more of the outside world that he belongs to the outside world but actually he also is a person who deep down craves the sense of home and I feel for many gay men this is such an important feeling which uh throughout their lives they're not made to feel that they can also have a home of their own they can also have a space of their own and I wanted to give these two men that space and I want to see what are they doing with that space and the similar occurs with I think Zubina as well on the other hand when her idea of space becomes very different and there is a constant fight on the one hand there is this thing that at least her husband owns and then in part two of the novel we look at the idea of displacement and what does it cause you know because displacement not just from a home but from the city and and I wanted to deal with that because generally you know we think that oh a poor person if they have the chance to go to Delhi why won't they I mean that is all there is but I wanted to talk about say how do women think of displacement because the first displacement that they feel is being displaced from the father's house and then continuously how do they then think about displacement and this is something I wanted to think through Zubina's character now how every element is so deliberate uh you know and sort of you want to sort of you know chafe against the norms and you've done that in a very smooth way I mean it's it's very lovely to read the book because it just goes all in very easily and yeah I think it's very interesting actually because when we think of home we think of a safe space and in South Asia and in a lot of other countries it's not a safe space for so many gay people because we don't have that because we're community driven society and we're living with generations and people coming in and out of the home so we always have eyes on us and privacy I think the notion of privacy and love in India is very interesting because we just don't have that concept in our own homes because we don't own oftentimes we don't own our own home so we're not living just you know as a unit so I thought that was very interesting absolutely and that I show through that entire Ojas's character that how they're constantly crossing boundaries this periods of privacy that it's just it feels is it ever there and that's the conversation he has with his brother that if they respected me would they have done that they don't even respect me because I'm not married and you know how men get their validation as they age because they are married and here because he isn't married so the idea is the parents think they can just transcend the boundaries that you only get to have privacy if you're married how marriage then becomes that kind of an institution or the permission for you to live a life of your own I think that's also very interesting I think for men maybe it's like legitimacy and for women a lot of times if you're lucky I mean marriage is also like oh you can you know you don't have a curfew anymore because now you're married and you can do it but before you're married you have to be at home at a certain time and all of those things so it's very interesting how you know these social structures play so much into our lives I think we'd all relate to that you know sense of being scrutinised or privacy in different levels of course but I think that comes out really well in the book so tell me a little bit more about you know how you got published I know that I saw that Dharini Bhaskar is your editor so and you wrote multiple drafts as you said in the in this conversations tell me about your journey to publication so as I said at the beginning of the conversation the idea of the novel came to me in 2019 but I never started to write it I started writing it in 2020 I think around May or July and I think the first draft took me around six months to write but that was a completely different novel because it just was a very different kind of a book and then I moved I started to write I started writing other things but then I came back I was doing my master's at the time and while I was doing my master's I started revisiting this novel during the semester breaks and because you know my master's was mostly online because of the pandemic so I kept revisiting the novel when I had time and in between my life was taking place because I was clearing the then exams for PhD and teaching and all of that and then 2022 came I got my postgraduate degree and I started to that time started to completely rework the novel for the second time in that six-month window when I had the gap between my master's and PhD I had the novel I knew this is going to be the novel and I started pitching the novel to agents because I didn't directly go to publishers I started pitching it to agents I mean I pitched it to three agents and the third agent was Kanishka he showed interest in the novel so I just so in 2023 Kanishka showed interest he asked for the full draft his editor read the draft then they gave revisions so I worked on it again so I wrote the third draft of the book and then I submitted it again and then Kanishka was like you know maybe we could maybe you could hire a literary editor because the novel needs more polishing this and that and all of that happened so by and by I think it was like the fifth draft I had written and then Kanishka pitched it after in 2024 end he pitched it to Harper Collins so and he signed me in 2024 the beginning of 2024 so one and a half years I didn't even have a contract with a so I was just working in this limbo and at this time I was also starting my PhD field work and all the work and it's just it was just I was just working with a lot of uncertainty because Kanishka had said I'm not finalising it yet there's a lot of work we will see so two for one and a half years I was working with we will see we will let you know and I was just working and working with no end in sight and I thought let me see let's see what happens with it I'm just going to follow and work whatever he's expecting me to do and I just listened I put my head down and I listened and I worked and I worked and finally at Harper Collins Harini really liked the work and she was just she signed me up last year in 2025 in February I signed the contract with Harper Collins and then the work started and then another draft was written so around like six seven drafts were written through these years from 2020 till it was out finally so yeah that was I think largely the journey of a lot of patience yeah and you didn't give up you know because most people would have just given up I mean if you didn't have a contract and you know you and you had to rework and rework till it was good enough to be signed on by him a lot of people you know maybe just not continued but you did it so yeah and I did it all in silence right because you see I'm not famed in the idea of novel writing so so I didn't even tell my own family that you know I have written a novel because because then the expectation will be to be out when it's going to be out so I was working everything was happening in silence nobody knew it my friends got to know about it only when Harper Collins agreed that his last year so all these years I've just been working in silence and they they all think that I'm only working with PhD and also when they also want to be like what and it's weird it's strange and and it's also uh yeah it has been but I also think about it many times and you know my parents still they don't know about what the book is about thankfully they don't read in English and I don't know how to tell them what the book is about because they are conservative and there is a lot of there and there's no conversation so it's been a very strange experience now that I think about it about the book because uh I don't know how to tell because when I have to introduce the book I see many people especially within academic spaces who are elderly they make a weird face when I say it's a book about gay men in an open relationship so that homophobia is still there and I understand uh I understand why it is and because you see sometimes you also know when you write a book what kind of an audience will be there for it so I don't I didn't expect that it's going to be like every other person is going to read this book because it is not if you know it's about these two gay men in an open relationship and a Muslim woman in the slums I don't know I mean if if see the larger spectrum of the reading audience would actually want to read this story and I get it I agree I mean and it's also weird you know because usually when when you have a book out I'm sure the book has been celebrated and everything but it's celebrated by everyone you know but I guess in a conservative society it's not celebrated by everybody and there's some people who yeah will look pretty funny that's just sad yeah that's that's the thing you know because I mean what can I expect from others I haven't even I couldn't even show the cover to my parents you know it was so awkward so I had to just quickly just say look my book's out it's a story about these two men who are just friends I had to lie this to them because what language do I have right so I had to just lie to them that it's about two friends and I just showed him my picture and he was very happy my father was very happy seeing my picture on a book and he thought maybe I did something really good in my life but yeah there is no conversation because I still when I see many writers and when the books are out many writers you know they have their family relatives writing about the book talking about the book that's not been my experience and it's kind of sad but it's also understandable because that's how it is largely right there is no conversation around that yeah but I think it's great I mean we definitely need more stories like this and for them to be spoken about as well so what what are you working on next now I am working first I have to finish my doctoral thesis so I'm trying to finish wrap up with that and it has no connection with my novel because I'm working on something so different I'm working on the sewage and drainage infrastructure of Calcutta I'm looking at the history of city making in Calcutta and all of that but besides that I am working on another novel and it's a very it's a very different novel in the sense that it's not set in Calcutta as such it's set in like a small town and it's a very different book because it it doesn't have like 30 year olds it has a little younger audience and it's also not set in contemporary times it's set a little in the early 2000s so but let's see where it goes to so I can't wait to see what you write next and by the way I love the cover of this book it's fabulous too I love it yeah yeah is it a painting uh it's an art by uh Veer Mishra it's a I think it's a digital art that he made fabulous yeah yeah and it's it's simple but it's so evocative uh okay so now that moves us to our last section which is a rapid fire section which I'll ask you some questions and you can answer in one sentence or one word oh okay I'm excited yes if unfolding was to be made into a movie who would play Ralf, Ojas and Zubina? Okay uh I have thought about this question many times uh Ralf so I'll start with Ojas, Ojas I think Ranbir Kapoor would do a good job from Bollywood he would be very intense and also but uh the way the character is uh Ralf I don't know actually Ralf I would want someone new to come up I want someone new to be there uh because he's also uh because we in Bollywood have so much of these fair skin tone guys and Ralf is not a very fair skin tone guy and all of that and I want someone new a new face to be there and for Zubina so maybe if uh if Kareena Kapoor was younger I would have wanted her because I really love her but I don't know at the contemporary times who could play her because it's also very strange uh I think many would also say Alia but I don't know I really don't know but I know that I would want Ojas to be played by Ranbir Kapoor that's a good choice I can see Ranbir Kapoor playing Ojas okay one quirky habit or ritual you have while writing that most people don't know about so when when I want to have tea or coffee and this is a very weird thing uh and I don't want to get up I make the characters have the tea or coffee in that time though so I think a lot of what I want to do at the time and I really cannot get up so I make the characters do it so that it's very cathartic and then in my later when I come back to the draft later I remove the scene so it's a very strange habit that I have while writing where I what I want to do I make the characters do and then I come back and realise okay they're having too much tea so in this novel also the characters were going on having tea a lot and I realised okay that's the problem they're having too much tea so I started removing I made I was making them have sodas I was making them have this so these things I tend to do this is a very weird habit that I have so yeah I love it though it's a great hack I think next time I want dessert or a midnight snack I'm just going to write a story where one of the characters wants it yeah yeah what's one book you recommend one book oh my god that's a very difficult question I cannot recommend just one book but because whichever book I'm reading recently I start to love that recently I read I read the book in this year and I really loved it many people may have read it it's Henry James's The Portrait of the Lady it's fantastic beautiful excellent book and I think everyone should read it not just because of the story but also because of the way you can learn about writing a story with such detailed observations and clarity I think that was just brilliant that book both at the level of the story and at the level of the form so maybe The Portrait of the Lady by Henry James and thank you so much for this conversation it's been amazing diving into unfolding your city your character so much in between and do my listeners think about someone you love or care about what's the one thing you've never said to them but always wish you could tell me in the comments hope you enjoyed this episode of Books and Beyond with Bound this podcast is created by Bound a company that helps you grow through story find us at Bound India on all social media platforms tune in every Wednesday as we peek into the lives and minds of some brilliant authors from India and South Asia