How did we get here

In an increasingly polarised time, I was also weary of depicting the country in binaries like Left and Right or liberal and conservative. I wanted to explore the fault lines within a liberal living room or how Hindu nationalism manifests differently across right-wing parties in a single state. But when one gets so granular, how not to lose sight of the universal in the particular? Is it possible to be local, regional, national, and transnational at once, without reducing any one dimension in service of another? To hold in focus both the drop in the ocean and the ocean in the drop, not to mention all the currents in between, remained one of the tougher aspects of the work.

Nevertheless, over time, I closed in on a set of characters that I hoped both exemplified and nuanced the strains in our current political discourse and their underlying psychologies. And the rising conflict between them spawned a new set of concerns. How, for instance, should the writer balance empathy and judgment while crafting arguments or situations in which the actors deeply hurt each other? Can the story give equal weight to multiple points of view without courting moral relativism? To write about a political moment is also, ultimately, to confront the violence it unleashes both in the real world and the world of the text. But does depicting an assault on a woman or bigotry between communities in detail confront the truth or amplify a culture of violence?

This uneasiness over whether art, in its reach for a truth beyond polemics, absorbs and sustains what is most treacherous about our politics also led me to question the ways in which we tell stories altogether. I asked myself what it says about a novel that critiques social inequality if it is told from the point of view of only three characters: one white, and two upper-caste. How would it change the plot if I brought in a greater diversity of voices? I didn’t know, but I wanted to find out. That is why the perspectives in the novel go from three characters to nine to those of a whole city on a night when it descends into violence. The way the story unfolds reveals its own expanding democratic consciousness.

Of course, no one novel can represent an entire city, let alone a country. The protagonists in my novel remain from the lower to upper middle class, and even when it goes beyond, the overarching structure still betrays a privileged perception of what constitutes a good democracy. There are also other unresolved questions in the work. For example, does such a scheme correct existing erasures, or create a liberal utopia where everyone gets a voice, and the reader is comforted by a fiction that is far from the reality of our public discourse? And does ventriloquising other positions permit the writer to escape her own?

There is a point in any long-laboured project when one is utterly in the dark. When the only way out is through, and the work proceeds in a series of experiments, each a response to the last. It was only gradually that I realised the essence of my endeavour, given its form and subject, lay in these very questions and the novel’s evolving response to them. The poet Lu Chi has written “a composition comes into being as the incarnation of many living gestures.” This conception gave me hope that, however incrementally, it is possible for art to look over the walls of the political culture that births it and begin the search for new horizons.

Devika Rege is the author of Quarterlife.