Majumdar’s The Scent of God (2019) takes up touching not merely as a theme in the book but practically forming the whole narrative drive. The word “touch” appears 61 times in the novel. It takes place in an ashram boys’ school, the classic environment for development and explorations of non-heteronormative relations. These are also not captured by the label heteronormative. The touching among the characters is frequent, vivid, jealous, loving and wholly devoid of a sociopolitical label. It exists in a kind of timelessness as beings removed from history. 

The main character, Anirvan, also in a close third-person like Ori in Firebird, is a good friend of Kajol. In fact, Anirvan worships Kajol, who has the strength and character that Anirvan feels he lacks, while both are quite up to par in school. Curiously, Kajol in turn appears to admire Anirvan deeply, although it is hard to say exactly what Kajol feels beyond being worshipped. In the opening scene, a tight dark roomful of students watching cricket, Pakistan vs. India on television, the role of touch between these two is revealed right away: 

Here, Anirvan is in control as he almost always proves to be. Their touching arrives erratically during the day, with no question of shame or need for any label for their actions. It is only a way to reach evermore into another, as if an integral part of the religious environment. There, all the rituals are carried out faithfully in form, while content is found in the flesh — in the body and senses of the real world. Anirvan is so attuned to the rituals that he learns to assimilate and imitate them in an uncanny control. In fact, he is soon agreeably surprised to hear Kajol nickname him Yogi, the spirit-master of control, the router to nirvana.  

The opening chapter continues the undifferentiating innocence: 

Further in the text, the touching becomes more involved, to the point where, to many people, it may not seem “touching”. There’s an accretion of that sense, through the course of the story, with greater and greater intensity and passion. It’s enlightening to view this progression: 

Tenderness of touch melds into a tender violence: 

Sexuality is removed from politics even while politics swirls around in the form of the Communist Party. There he finds Renu, to which sexuality serves as a concomitant tool of impassioned struggle. It also remains gender-undifferentiated, not mere bisexuality but pan-sexuality. A childlike sexual cosmopolitanism. It retains a purity that politics can besmirch, if one lets it. Anirvan innocently, but hardly naively, does not let it. 

The term “bisexuality” or “mere bisexuality” does not capture the experience here. Some people have voiced that bisexuality is treated as the least serious of LGBT.  But what these characters experience seems to elude even “bisexuality.” Their experience is more about the most basic human substance that existed far before formal politics hit the scene in human prehistory. It is the substance that made humans human. To that extent, the very idea here may outrage some readers and believers. Many people, gay or not, may find something immoral, a self-indulgence, in this line of innocence that the author never judges. Consider again Yogi’s love of playing with his grandmother’s hair.  

Non-differentiation almost needs no politics. Or it is the stowaway on politics’ ferry that has leapt ahead to the far shore, long before the boat. That boat often only scorns the very idea of landing. 

By sneaking a place aboard, such a complaint of complacency and indulgence may be leveled against Janice Pariat’s The Nine-Chambered Heart (2018). Each of the nine chambers belongs to a lover of the unnamed female central character and is narrated by that lover. That central character is steadily moving across Eurasia, to cities vaguely labeled “the city without a river,” “the city with a river,” and so on. Each affair has a start and finish. And each loving is sincere and dedicated until circumstance, not hate or abandonment, ends it. But each love remains intact in its heart chamber. The first chapter’s love already poses a social risk: a male student of the central character. But the characters barely fret the risk. Another love is female, and the story makes no particular noise about the fact. In fact, like much of the novel, the love is so subtle as to make the gender identification purely implicit. “I am in love with you by way of deepest, most profound friendship.” (p. 77) The two had already been friends. Their coming to love one another is not so much a move into a new realm as it is a reasonable growth given the real world they already inhabit.  

Much of their closeness comes about by their capacity to share stories of previous loves without falling into jealousy. One of the two had a previous love die — thus the chapter title “The Undertaker.” This new love helped her bury this death. At times, their love hints at its own sensuality being indirect, abstract, hypothetical. 

As in Majumdar’s theater, this bit of theater hinted in the escalator can be as real in its imitation as the world it imitates — if not more so.  

This abstract love has loads of tactile firecracker never quite seeming to get lit — but all the more powerful in its pure promise. And the merest touch becomes volatile as paint thinner. 

It is almost impossible to discern whether the two lovers of this chapter are of the same gender; I even feel at risk in deciding the two are women. But why should the answer here matter? No question of differentiation arises because the characters are living beyond such an issue. You can say they are living the dream in a gender-free land. 

Touch, in Pariat, is the trail to love. In Majumdar, it is love. Pariat’s loves are successive; Majumdar’s are not so much promiscuous, with that label’s judgmentalism, as generous, joyful, all-loving. In both authors’ work, undifferentiating is personal, not political. But here the personal is made political only to the point of saying, I aim only to be and to love. Let those who can, do. That’s the point of the politics. The political has then become personal by living the point and the end of the politics.

Or these authors may be beyond their time.