An affair between 2 men in India changes the course of both their lives forever in this searing queer love story about shame, hope, and identity.
"Rao sheds light without judgement…Thoughtful, tender storytelling at its finest." -Marie Claire
High up in the misty mountains of Darjeeling, a landslide cuts off a crumbling hillside hotel from the outside world. Trapped together with other guests and staff, 2 men begin to exchange lingering glances. For Neville, a charismatic student, such encounters are nothing new-urgent kisses in stairwells, fleeting encounters in parked cars. But for Pavan, a shy hotel employee accustomed to hiding in plain sight, their growing connection threatens to upend the careful life he has built in secrecy.
Years later, the men meet again by chance, this time surrounded by the towering skyscrapers and ghostly smog of Mumbai. Neville is now a restless graduate, trying to find his footing in the city. Pavan has long since fled the hills and begun a new life for himself working in a luxurious city hotel. As their renewed flirtation quickly turns fraught, long-buried secrets from their shared past threaten to tumble into the light.
Set on the cusp of India's landmark ruling to decriminalize homosexuality, Half Light is an atmospheric, elegantly wry story of outlawed desire and the fragile hope for a life beyond concealment. From literary powerhouse Mahesh Rao, this tender exploration of the struggle for acceptance and understanding will appeal to readers of Douglas Stuart and Tom Crewe. Mahesh Rao grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. He has worked as a lawyer, academic researcher and bookseller. His debut novel, The Smoke Is Rising, won the Tata First Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, the Crossword Book Award and the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize. His short fiction has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Bridport Prize. Mahesh has written for the New York Times, The Baffler, Prospect and Elle. He lives most of the year in Mysore, India. He came to see what exactly had been destroyed. The woman who raised the alarm had made it sound as though half the hill had come down: a huge blitz of trees, rocks and mud. When Pavan reached the bend in the track, he saw that it was a more modest landslide. But it was bad enough. A chunk had been gouged out of the hillside, boulders and scree piled across the road below. A tangle of roots pointed skywards. All around him, the soil was red and oozy. As he looked at the men scrabbling to try and shift the rocks with their bare hands, a fresh drizzle gusted into his face. He lowered his head and turned back towards the hotel, fists balled in the pockets of his jeans.
Sometimes the cold up here felt clean, a purity that came from the mountains, with each glassy intake of breath. Today it seemed dirty, dark clouds closing in on the hillside, acrid smoke drifting across from someone's bonfire, slush seeping into his shoes. His teeth chattered so hard he felt they would come loose and fill his mouth. He had never known cold like this where he had grown up, a hard-baked village almost on the other end of the subcontinent, where people put cotton wool in their ears to protect themselves from even a slight early-morning breeze.
Over the course of the three years that he had lived in these hills, he had heard about landslides. One had crashed through a neighbouring town, flattening part of a nursing home. He had been told that passers-by on the road could see old ladies in nighties on the first floor motioning to them in terror from the open maw of the building. Several people had perished, a couple of the bodies found only days later. As rescuers dug through the rubble, the stench of dead cows filled their nostrils. A freakish tumult had meant that a little hairy hog had ended up in the branches of a tree, shrieking in panic. There had been astonishment that,
