Between the Lines: On Desire

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes about desire and the ways it moves quietly through South Asian writing, shaping lives even when it is not spoken aloud.

Desire is often imagined as something that announces itself and yet, more often than not, it does the opposite, settling instead into the smallest of gestures, into pauses that stretch a moment just slightly longer than necessary, into the careful choice of words that circle what cannot quite be said, until it becomes less an event and more a presence, something that lingers at the edges of speech and thought, altering both without ever fully declaring itself. It is not always recognised as desire when it first arrives.

Sometimes it appears as restlessness, as a dissatisfaction that cannot be easily explained, as a quiet pull toward something or someone that feels both familiar and out of reach. Sometimes it is mistaken for duty, folded so deeply into expectation that it becomes indistinguishable from it. And sometimes it is resisted so consistently that it begins to reshape itself, finding other ways to exist.

In South Asian writing, desire is rarely allowed the simplicity of fulfilment. It is shaped, redirected, and interrupted by family, caste, gender, weight of what is permitted and what must remain unsaid, so that what emerges is not a singular experience, but a series of negotiations, each marked by the conditions under which it must be lived.

To understand desire, one needs to ask what is wanted, who is allowed to want, and at what cost.

There are forms of desire that move quietly within the structures of the everyday, so familiar that they risk being overlooked.

In Difficult Pleasures, Anjum Hasan traces lives in which longing does not erupt dramatically but accumulates over time, surfacing in fleeting recognitions, in the awareness of paths not taken, in the subtle dissonance between what is lived and what might have been. The characters do not always name their desires, and yet they remain present, shaping decisions in ways that are both quiet and enduring.

Similarly, in Love Stories by Annie Zaidi, intimacy is rarely uncomplicated. Desire appears alongside hesitation, alongside misrecognition, alongside the awareness that wanting something does not guarantee its possibility. What remains is not resolution, but a lingering sense of what could not fully unfold.

These are not stories of grand transgression. They are stories of interior movement, of desire that exists within constraint, adjusting itself to the boundaries it cannot entirely cross. For women, desire often arrives entangled with expectation, shaped by roles that leave little room for it to exist freely.

Across Meena Kandasamy‘s wider work, the question of desire is inseparable from power that impacts who is allowed to express it, whose desire is taken seriously, and whose is dismissed or controlled. What emerges is not simply a portrayal of longing, but an examination of the structures that define its limits.

In the work of K R Meera, too, desire often carries a quiet intensity, shaped as much by what cannot be acted upon as by what can. It is contained and held within the rhythms of lives that do not always allow it expression. It does not disappear when contained, but alters tone, gesture, and perception, becoming part of how the world is experienced, even when it remains unspoken. There are also forms of desire that are marked as transgressive from the outset.

In One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan, desire intersects with caste, ritual, and community expectation, revealing how deeply it is regulated by structures that extend beyond the individual. What is wanted cannot be separated from what is permitted, and the consequences of crossing that boundary are never purely personal. Queer desire, in particular, often exists within this space of negotiation.

In contemporary queer writing, desire emerges not only as attraction, but as recognition of the self, of the possibility of being seen differently, and of the risk that such recognition carries. It is shaped by visibility and invisibility, by the need to conceal and the desire to reveal. Desire here is not only about connection. It is about survival.

And then there are desires extending beyond the body, beyond intimacy, into something less easily defined. The desire for autonomy. For a life not yet lived. For the possibility of choosing differently. In many South Asian narratives, especially those shaped by constraint, this form of desire becomes central. On many occasions, it reads like an insistence on something more, even when that more cannot be clearly articulated. It appears in the wish to leave, in the refusal to accept what has been assigned, in the subtle reimagining of what might be possible. It always persists.

What becomes clear, across these works, is that desire is never neutral. It is shaped by access to space, language, and recognition. It is also shaped by what is allowed to surface and what must remain submerged. And it is shaped by history, by hierarchy, by the quiet but persistent knowledge of consequence. For some, desire can be expressed openly, even if imperfectly. For others, it must be disguised, redirected, or held in place. For some, it leads to transformation. For others, it becomes something that must be carried without resolution. Despite these differences, it continues to move through these texts with a certain insistence, refusing to disappear entirely, even when it cannot be fully realised.

Perhaps this is because desire is not only about wanting something specific, but about the act of wanting itself. About the way it alters perception, draws attention to what is missing, and creates a sense of possibility that may or may not be fulfilled. It shifts how time is experienced, how spaces are inhabited, and how relationships are understood. It introduces a tension between what is and what could be, and in doing so, it unsettles the idea that life can be lived entirely within the boundaries that have been set for it.

Still, desire remains deeply personal, shaped by structures, memory, experience, and the quiet accumulation of what one has learned to expect or to deny. It can make a person reach outward or turn inward. It can lead to connection or to solitude. It can be a source of energy, or of quiet ache. And it can remain, even when it is not acted upon.

Perhaps this is why it resists resolution. Because if desire is shaped so differently by each life, by what has been allowed, by what has been refused, and by what has been imagined but never realised, then it cannot be reduced to a single narrative, a single outcome, a single meaning. It continues instead as something unfinished, something that does not quite settle, something that lingers just beyond articulation.

It is not always the fulfilled desires that stay. Sometimes it is the ones that were almost named, chosen, and lived, the ones that remain suspended somewhere between memory and imagination, never quite settling into either.

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