Namrata reviews The Pretenders by Avtar Singh (Simon & Schuster India, 2025), observing how it asks for attention, for a slow and compassionate reading of our own pretences.
There are novels that speak of catastrophe and novels that breathe within it. Avtar Singh’s The Pretenders belongs to the latter kind. It does not document the pandemic so much as it inhabits its silences, its suspended hours, its strange intimacies. Set across a fevered Asia during the Delta wave, the book opens not with spectacle but with an image both absurd and unforgettable: Shamsher Singh, or Sammy, a man of privilege, watches another man wander Delhi’s streets with a corpse, seeking a place where death might be allowed its dignity. It is an opening that sets the novel’s moral key, a world where humanity persists, uneasy and luminous, amid collapse.
Singh’s canvas stretches far beyond Delhi’s locked-down neighborhoods. Mei, in Beijing, struggles to reconcile duty and desire; her mother Nina, stranded in Jakarta, measures isolation against the paranoias of her husband; Changez Khan, adrift in Bangkok, discovers unexpected grace even as his past shadows him. Each of these characters moves through the blurred edges of the pandemic to places where class, nation, and private sorrow intersect. Their lives are not neatly braided. Rather, they echo one another, as if across an expanse of masked faces and shuttered borders.