Exclusive Extract: Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya
We are delighted to publish an exclusive extract from Deviants, Santanu Bhattacharya's second novel. This bold, electrifying story follows a family in which three generations of gay men in India fight for love and dignity against the currents of their times.
It is almost the new millennium, you are a new adult, and you and Y have been together four years.
The passing of time is difficult to capture; how does one stem the flow of water? Four years you feel love every day, from the tips of your fingers to the breath leaving your nostrils; the little bird sings until its heart is full, sucking up all the oxygen that is its destiny. Four years of rushing back to his place after school, of exploring each other’s bodies, opening up those closed-off pores, letting his scent meld into yours, yours into his; him sneaking into yours when your family aren’t around, of telling each other everything, of studying for exams, of devouring movies of all stripes.
Four years of observing how his body moves in quick jerks when he’s excited; of him flattening his hair down on his forehead when he’s nervous; of finding the tiny brown fleck in his left eye, or was it the right, and checking every few months to see if it’s grown. Four years of watching him sit cross-legged like a yogi, his left foot free, of getting into the habit of fondling his big toe, then sucking it, as his favourite MLTR croons from the mixtape ... Four years of letting him inside you, the first time in the shower, knowing he hasn’t done it before, he doesn’t know how it’s done, but trusting him to not hurt you.
On one of those afternoons, he runs his finger down the length of your neck, from your jaw to your shoulder, and says in his casual fact-stating way, ‘You have a lovely neck, you know?’ You joke, it’s such a weird compliment, it’s the first nice thing he’s said about your looks, but really, is this the best he can come up with? He juts his head back and surveys your neck like an engineer at a building site. ‘It is beautiful, the way it’s so lean and graceful, the way your head sits on it, the way it curves at the nape, makes me want to tuck my lips in there forever ...’ You don’t know this yet, but you will look at your neck in the mirror all your life, feel beautiful even when it is attenuated and wrinkled.
The passing of time is difficult to capture. And so you write, by hand, in a journal you won’t remember buying; it has a coarse jute binding, two shades of brown in check like a chessboard. You write and write the four years, every little nook, every little cranny; you write his body and his touch, the rains and the sun, the smell and the salt of him. You write to hold back time, to put into words everything you can’t speak aloud, for the page to bear witness to what other people aren’t seeing, so this love may live even after the little bird has died from singing for too long.
And through the passing of those four years, things begin to go slightly awry between you and Y. It isn’t that you don’t feel love, not that you don’t rush to each other whenever you can, but there is a toll to keeping the most important part of your lives secret, as though you’ve locked a giant river out of plain sight, and every time you open the door, someone takes a peep, or a bit of the river leaks out, sending you scurrying to lock it up all over again.
During that time, there are many infatuated girls and some horny boys in your life, they come and go, none of them mean anything. The girls you have to accommodate to protect your relationship with Y, from turning people’s hunches into suspicion into gossip; some of the boys are genuine crushes you can’t help giving in to, like when your handsome lab-partner makes you giggle too much, or when the charismatic bully who usually calls you Y’s bitch kisses you and you let him because you feel vindicated. These little things drive Y up the wall with jealousy, but you and Y have never promised fidelity, that was never inked in the covenant, you have only sworn each other to secrecy, and that is a heavy enough burden to bear.
Y doesn’t have as many distractions, though there is one girl who is so in love with him that she makes the bile shoot straight up to your mouth. But he has friends, lots of them, and over the four years, they grow, hanging out at his place, in his room, that sanctum sanctorum that was once inviolable. And because you’re still shy and awkward, Y leaves you out sometimes, until he’s doing it often. You stand on the street and watch the silhouettes of the boys in his window, heads thrown back in gaiety, drumming the headboard of his bed, swinging their legs as they sit on his table, hands moving deftly as they spin a ball around; sometimes you can hear strains of their cackles, the inane banter of young men who live for the day, by the day.
When you go to Y’s place, his mother talks about his other friends with as much enthusiasm as she talks about you – this one came yesterday, that one is such a prankster – and you wonder if you were ever special, that maybe you’d built hearths in your head where there were only embers. Then she looks at you inquisitively, why you don’t visit more often, are things not as they were before? It is only years later that Y will tell you that his mother once heard the two of you on the phone; she’d picked up the receiver of the parallel connection on the other floor; you’re not sure what you said to each other that day, but she told Y that she had listened in, she didn’t admonish or caution him, she almost had an acquiescent mirth in her eyes. And all those years later, your heart will warm at the thought that perhaps she did give you her blessing, was the only witness to your relationship with Y, saw how happy you made her son ...
This text is extracted from Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya (£16.99), published by Fig Tree on 13 February, 2025.