Mahesh Rao, "Half Light" (Penguin Random House India, 2025)

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**Mahesh Rao** (1:16)
Welcome to the New Books Network.

**Nicholas Gordon** (1:20)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. On September 6th, 2018, India's Supreme Court ruled that Section 377, a law that criminalized consensual homosexual activity, was unconstitutional, reversing an early decision from 2013 News headlines and LGBT activists hailed the decision as a major step forward for same-sex rights in India. But in Mahesh Rao's new novel, Half Light, the course deliberation sit in the background behind the budding relationship between Pavan, a hotel worker in Darjeeling, and Neville, a young, confident student. They meet first in Pavan's hotel in Darjeeling in 2014 Then after a tragic incident, they meet again four years later in Mumbai in 2018 I'm joined today by Prarthana Prakash. Prarthana, let's say a few words about yourself before we get rolling.

**Prarthana Prakash** (2:14)
Yeah. I've been writing about business and culture over the last couple of years. I grew up in the South Indian city of Chennai and I'm now based in London.

**Nicholas Gordon** (2:24)
Mahesh grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. He has worked as a lawyer, academic researcher, and bookseller in the UK. His debut novel, The Smoke is Rising, won the Tata First Book Award for fiction. His short fiction has been shortlisted for numerous awards. One Point Two Billion, his collection of short stories set across 13 Indian states and Polite Society, a deli set reimagining of Jane Austen's Emma, have both been published to critical acclaim. He has also written for The New York Times, The Baffler, Prospect, and Elle. So Mahesh, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Let's say we start with the inspiration for this novel and for the setting of this novel.
It's set in the years leading up to this Supreme Court decision that decriminalized homosexuality in the four years prior. Actually, in between, the first decision that upheld it was constitutional and the later one saying was unconstitutional. And what was it about this time period that kind of made it such kind of fresh ground for a novel?

**Mahesh Rao** (3:21)
Hi, Nick. Thanks so much for having me on. So you mentioned in your introduction the date in September 2018 when the judgment was handed down that decriminalized homosexuality. So I think that was really the starting point. I remember, as so many of us do, where I was on that day, the judgment came through in the afternoon. And a lot of us were, you know, glued to our social media. We were watching TV. We were just waiting because this judgment has had a long and torturous journey to the Supreme Court. It had already been to the Supreme Court once, which had declined to decriminalize the law at that point. And so this was the last chance for a generation, it seemed, to many of us. And there was no guarantee about which way it would go. So as you can imagine, it was really fraught afternoon. And the decision came. And of course, there was a kind of mad euphoria. There was a lot of relief.
All of those things. But even that afternoon, I remember thinking that everything had suddenly gone very quiet after we discovered what had happened. Even that afternoon, it just felt like the waters had sort of settled down again. And the question that came to my mind at that point was, oh, what now? What next? And then I didn't really give it much thought because I was working on something else. But as the years went on, it felt to me that that moment and what had led up to that moment and also what follows that moment, it would provide quite an interesting scaffolding for a novel. And that's why it has these two time periods, as you mentioned, in the book. We have the 2014 section, which is four years prior to The Judgment. We see these two men leading their lives at that point. And then in the second half of the novel, we have 2018, which is that key year for our purposes. The Judgment comes down and the two main characters hear about it too in the second half of the novel. So that's why I needed that sort of run, that kind of approach to that momentous change in the novel.