Book Excerpt: The New New Delhi Book Club by Radhika Swarup

An exclusive excerpt from The New New Delhi Book Club by Radhika Swarup (Tranquebar, 2024)

Chronicling This Time

Early on in the new academic year, they were asked to write about what lockdown meant to them. It had been a month or more since the country shut down. Mallav had forgotten precisely how long, and he thought it was typical of the time that he didn’t have the concentration required to tackle his task.

‘I’m not asking you to confront some heavy-duty tome,’ Professor Sharma, young and new to the university, said to them. ‘But chronicling this time should help keep your analytical faculties sharp.’

Analytical faculties, Mallav thought. Analytical faculties. When it was as much as he could manage to remember to shower in the morning, when it was as much as he could manage to maintain eye contact with his mother when they congregated for mealtimes, when it was all he could do to keep himself from strangling those damned mongrels next door, and when it was all he could do to stop himself from spending his entire day in the garden looking out for the mongrels’ beautiful mistress.

On a Zoom call to mark a family wedding anniversary, his cousin in America asked how his writing was going. ‘Well,’ he said, shrugging, slouching back as his mother stared at him.

‘But it’s so easy for you,’ his cousin said. ‘I mean, your father is a famous journalist. And there is that celebrated writer opposite who is giving you feedback on your poetry, I thought.’ She had just qualified as an OBGYN, his cousin, and he wondered if he could point out that her father was an OBGYN too. Had her father’s profession eased her way through medical school? She was laughing now, flashing a bulbous engagement ring. ‘And you have the blessing of Covid on top of everything. All you have to do is sit in your room and write. No distractions. What could be better!’

‘Really,’ his mother complained. ‘He’s hardly ever out of his room anyway. God only knows what he does all day in there,’ and then it was a free-for-all, everyone chiming in with an opinion, everyone ribbing him for his slouching and poor attitude and monosyllabic replies.

An aunt snorted at Mallav’s indifference. ‘Oof,’ she said, ‘there is something wrong with this generation.’ She meant her son Abhay, of course. His first cousin and two years his senior, Abhay had been pushed by his parents into a degree in economics instead of studying psychology as he had wanted to.

‘It’ll be too depressing,’ he was told repeatedly. ‘Interacting with all those unstable type people.’ And so he had done as his parents advised, following up his undergraduate degree with an MBA in the UK that had cost his family dearly, in money as much as in shattered expectations, as Abhay had returned to Delhi after his studies unemployed. The outlook in the UK had been downbeat on account of Brexit, and employment visas weren’t forthcoming for foreign students when so much of the existing workforce was looking for jobs.

He had remained, for the best part of three years, in a room in his parents’ house in Delhi where he applied for jobs he didn’t so much as receive an interview call for. His applications grew indiscriminate, and the last Mallav heard, Abhay had begun to apply to call centres who rejected him for being too old and too educated. ‘I can’t catch a break,’ he told Mallav the last time they met. It had been at a family function, and the two cousins had snuck out to the garden to smoke a quick cigarette. ‘I’ve been out of the job market for too long, and there are younger people graduating all the time. No one will look at me.’

‘Something will come up,’ Mallav had said, slapping his back, and though Abhay had smiled, and though he had nodded, they had both known his prospects weren’t good. Nothing did come up. Abhay stayed at home, becoming increasingly reclusive as time went on. Hikikomori, they called the phenomenon in Japan, referring to the youths who had responded to an unfavourable job market by withdrawing from society. Abhay put on weight, spending his evenings playing Fortnite and watching reels on his phone. He avoided socialising with his childhood friends who all seemed to have moved on in life, joining their parents’ businesses, progressing in their vocations and getting married.

Abhay hadn’t attended the last family wedding, and now that Mallav paused to consider, he couldn’t remember the last time he had met or spoken to his cousin. Unsurprisingly, he had shied away from the scrutiny that was sure to accompany the family Zoom call, and Mallav mostly found himself wishing he had followed his cousin’s example.

Excerpted with permission from the author and publishers of The New New Delhi Book Club by Radhika Swarup (Tranquebar, 2024)

About the Book

THE PORTRAIT OF A COMMUNITY, IN THIS CASE A DELHI NEIGHBOURHOOD, FACING THE UNCERTAINLY OF THE PANDEMIC TOGETHER.

As the pandemic brings India to a halt, an elderly woman falls down in her home and hears her leg break. Next door, a young girl stuck indoors persuades her taciturn old neighbour to set up a book club. A few doors down, a wife contemplates the plans she once made with an ex-boyfriend as her husband grows distant. A young boy falls in love with a girl on the rooftop across. A market trader battles against being housebound until his cousin is felled by the virus. And a migrant labourer sets off on foot, heading back to his village as work dries up in the city.

Evocative, lyrical and uplifting, the interconnected stories in The New New Delhi Book Club reveal Radhika Swarup’s innate ability to paint a vivid portrait of a community and to find hope and joy even in the most trying of times.

About the Author

Radhika Swarup is a lapsed banker and now a writer. Her work explores the themes of identity and exile. Her last novel Civil Lines looked at India’s 2018 Me Too moment, and was longlisted for the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Best Novel Award. here the River Parts, her debut novel, dealt with the lives and fortunes of a Hindu–Muslim couple parted in Punjab during the Partition of India and Pakistan and was chosen by Amazon India as one of their memorable books of 2016. It was also long listed by the Authors’ Club for the Best First Novel Award.
Radhika lives in London and visits Delhi often.