The decriminalisation of Section 377, handed down on September 6, 2018, served as the initial seed for Mahesh Rao's novel, Half Light. Rao recalls the widespread memory of that day: the news arriving in the afternoon, with people tracking the court's proceedings on social media, unsure which way the ruling would go. Even in that moment, Rao found the event and its aftermath a profoundly compelling subject for a novel, noting it was a type of story not yet seen. Initially, he did not envision himself as the author, as he was immersed in a completely different project. However, the thought persisted: 'someone should write a novel about this, about how we got here and what it might mean for the future.'
That was the very initial spark. As time progressed, he continued to reflect on the idea. After completing another novel, Half Light began to take form. It eventually coalesced around the two main characters and centered on the sequence of events leading up to that pivotal moment in September 2018. In the misty mountains of Darjeeling, a landslide entraps the guests and staff of a dilapidated hotel. Cooped up inside, two men exchange lingering glances. The novel follows their journey with their own identity, sexuality, and each other. Set on the brink of India’s ruling to decriminalise homosexuality, this is a tender, richly atmospheric and elegantly wry story of outlawed desire and the hope of a life beyond concealment. We spoke to Mahesh Rao, the author, about the creation of the novel.
Since we started by talking about the judgement, I was wondering if there was a particular approach you took to writing about queerness and how you navigated that space—writing queerness in India—and what you were hoping to add to the conversation within the landscape of queer literature in India through this book.
This is a book as much about class as it is about queerness. It was quite important for me to create two characters with very different backgrounds and show how they're both in the closet, but in very different ways. Part of that comes down to their personalities and individual temperaments, but part of it is definitely about their backgrounds and their class. That's something that's always interested me in almost anything I write: these areas of friction in India where class or caste, or sometimes both, collide against each other. These areas of particular friction lend themselves really well to fiction with the tension and conflict that can create. So, I suppose the particular kinds of queerness were embedded in their specific caste and class backgrounds. It was also important to give glimpses of different kinds of queerness in India throughout the novel, quite separate from the two main characters. Even when 377 existed, queer people were here; they were out; they were living their lives in a multiplicity of ways.
That's always the thing about India: you can't really write generally about anything; everything has to be extremely culturally specific to the kind of person you're talking about, in this vast country with all its faiths, languages, and social structures. For me, that was really interesting: to portray, for example, a fashion exhibition in Mumbai and the kind of queerness that might have happened there. Also, a sex party in Mumbai and the kind of queerness that might have happened there. There's also a hijra on the streets who's there briefly in the scene. There is a trans person in rural Karnataka. So, there are glimpses of queerness all through the book, even though the foreground holds two very particular stories. It's true because we're quite often alien to each other, and we're constantly learning about each other every time you meet someone new from a different part of the country, or even from the same part. One thing that's so interesting in India is the way language changes every 100 kilometres or so. Never mind 22 official languages, but even when you speak the same language—and I'm not even talking about dialect—there are different expressions, different ways of speaking just a few towns further down a railway line. I find that really fascinating, and that's why you've really got to feel like you know who your characters are in their specificity of where they come from and what their background is.
Drawing from understanding a character's background, how did you use this landscape to craft the emotional landscape of the characters? Was there meaning to those settings and a thought behind that?
One of the images that stuck in my head when I first began writing this novel was of a dilapidated hotel somewhere in the mountains where the inhabitants were all trapped by a landslide. It was just a visual image in my head. Normally, that kind of setting is for a murder mystery—you trap all your guests in a hotel and then one by one they all start getting picked off, a sort of Agatha Christie prototype. I wanted to use that atmosphere to tell the story of a very intense and quick romance, a sexual relationship, or a fling, whatever you want to call it. There's an incredibly claustrophobic atmosphere in the first part of the book because they are in Darjeeling; it is wet, cold, and misty, and they're trapped in this terrible hotel. The food is running out, the fuel is running out.
There's a feeling that the world's rules have been suspended, that the world's spinning on its axis has been suspended. Nothing really applies anymore to these characters, so they can take risks, or at least one of them can take risks, that you wouldn't normally take. That atmosphere of strangeness, claustrophobia, and suspension was really important to the first part of the book, so that's why it was set there. For the second part, I wanted something completely different. If the first part was set in a place that is remote, cold, and wet, the second part was in Mumbai—teeming with people, hot, sticky, completely urban, surrounded by the geography of that city as opposed to the forest and the hills. It was also that contrast, I think, both in terms of the writing, so that it's more interesting to write—you can get bored with your own settings—and as a reader, I think it's nice to have this feeling that you're almost reading two novellas back to back but with very, very different settings.
I was wondering about Neville and Pawan and how they come from such different worlds. How did you approach writing about their dynamic, especially with this stark difference but also the common ground of the tenderness of their connection? How do you balance that?
The thing that they have in common is, of course, that they're queer, but also that they're very much in the closet for different reasons and some similar reasons. For Pawan, it is almost a question of his entire livelihood. There is a line in the book where he says if he were to be found out, he feels he would lose his job, and then if he were to lose his job, he would also lose his place to live. To him, it feels like if he were outed or if he were to come out, almost his entire life would come collapsing like a pack of cards. But for Neville, it's quite a different scenario; he has a safety net; he has all his social and cultural capital. His is a family that is on its downward trajectory; they've kind of lost all their past glories, but certainly, what he hasn't lost is that sense they have of themselves as formerly important people. There's a kind of entitlement, a kind of confidence, a kind of brazenness about him that comes from all of that. So yes, they are both queer, and they are both in the half-light, very much in the closet, but in very different ways because the stakes are quite different for each of them.
The question of what's at stake is always really fascinating in literature and in real life because that's when you really get to see how power operates, who it really affects, what is at stake for each of these people, and what they can do about those things. When I write fiction, the way I write it, I often write about class, and that boils down to power and the way it manifests in different ways, whether that's social, political, or cultural. These questions of power are really, really interesting. One example of it is the age difference between these two. On the one hand, Neville has just turned 18, so you might think he's a bit more vulnerable, a bit more green in life. But actually, it is Pawan, who is six years older, who is much more green, much more vulnerable in a number of ways. So these questions are never easy to answer; there's so much to explore in terms of where these powers actually lie and who is exercising them.
What does the title mean?
It came from a sentence that occurs quite early in the book where Pawan is contemplating his life. He's not someone who particularly feels sorry for himself, even though his circumstances are difficult; he feels he's probably luckier than quite a few other people. What he's thinking about in that particular passage is the onset of spring, when Darjeeling will change and the flowers will bloom. He's very attuned to nature; he loves his forest walks; he loves the birds in the forest; he's very in tune with the seasons and to nature, so spring is a beautiful time for him. But it's not something that he takes joy in in the normal way, because Darjeeling is a kind of place where couples go and lovers go and families go, and all that can be really alienating for someone who is hiding their true self. So, even as the lightness of spring is on the horizon, he would always feel that he will remain only half in the light, and that's what that passage really tried to capture. The same goes for Neville, even though his particular approach to that metaphor is perhaps different.
Some inspirations that guided you?
I can't say with any specificity, but I do think that almost anything you've read—and I'm glad you mentioned different kinds of art forms, whether it's film or still images or plays or poetry or whatever—anything that we absorb artistically settles in us somewhere. It's almost like geological strata; there are layers and layers of insights, language, images, or moods that just settle within us and build up. I've always said I'm first a reader and then a writer. All of this stuff—a lifetime of reading—it does settle in you somewhere, and eventually, when you are writing, you drill deep down, you dig deep down through all those layers, and you take what you need. That's always what's so wonderful about reading: nothing is wasted; it's all there somewhere. It eventually might help many years down the line. It could be a sentence, an image, or a little character trait that has lodged in your psyche somewhere that you then build on later for whatever you're working on. So, nothing specific because I felt this was a terrain that I really knew well. I remember someone asked me at one of the events I've done about research, and I felt so lazy that I had done no research because it was all just there. I felt like I perhaps should have done a bit more, but no, it was just there. It was ready to come out, I think—no pun intended—it was ready to present itself for this particular novel.
You said you were a reader before you were a writer. First, why do you think it's important to read when you write, and second, why do you write in the first place—what does it do for you?
There are writers—I'm sure you've come across them too—who don't read. They want to be writers; they have, I suppose, an image of what it means to be a writer, a set of paraphernalia they perhaps associate with being a writer, a kind of cultural cachet, a specific social marker, and yet they will tell you that they don't read, which is completely astonishing to me. Or they read very functionally; they read stuff they absolutely have to. For anyone who has read as a child and then just found no other way to be, it's very hard to even explain because it's so necessary as part of your inner life. In my particular case, I was always desperate to be an adult; I was desperate to grow up. The easiest way I could find to do that, the only way I could find to do that, was to read things that I was forbidden from reading. When there are books in the house or whatever, you just reach for stuff that is just out of reach of your awareness or understanding. You're looking for the thing that will make you feel more grown up. That's how my childhood reading was very much informed, and then that just becomes so second nature to you that this is where you go when you're quiet, when you don't know what else to do, when you're depressed, when you're happy—it's just where you end up. People also talk about reading as though it's a virtuous thing, which I don't think it is at all.
People say that reading cultivates empathy; I don't buy that for a second. Some of the worst people we know are probably voracious readers. But I do think what reading does is it makes you better informed. Whether there's any virtue in it in and of itself, I don't know. Plus, I meet a lot of younger people who don't read very much at all, but they're incredibly smart, incredibly well informed, and they're getting their information and their emotional support—the kind of emotional support you or I might get from reading—they're getting it from other media, which is fine. They're getting it from film or video or something, or perhaps even gaming. They're getting it somewhere because they're incredibly smart and incredibly well informed about the world we live in and are politically astute in a way that I have to say I never was at their age.
Date 31-10-2025