‘Unfolding’: Rahul Singh’s novel presents unpretentious love in queer and working-class lives

Can only someone who identifies as queer write a queer novel? This question came up during a recent Juhu Reads conversation with Rahul Singh, author of Unfolding. It is a familiar debate in discussions on representation and authorship, and one that feels especially relevant today. With India’s Parliament passing the Transgender Bill in March 2026 – narrowing the definition of transgender and excluding several identities – the need for broader, more inclusive conversations has become urgent. In this context, it seems important to allow non-queer writers to engage with queer lives too, because meaningful change often depends on a collective voice that extends beyond any single community. Perhaps that is the best way to bring queerness out of the political closet and make it a normal part of mainstream public and private lives.

Into other lives

Over the course of the last four years, I have had the opportunity to read several memorable books that explore queer identities, desires, relationships, and ways of seeing the world. These books have taken me into very different lives across class and circumstances and have helped me see how queer experiences unfold in ways both familiar and unfamiliar. Trailblazing queer fiction writer R Raj Rao’s collection of short fiction, Crocodile Tears, which depicts love and intimate moments between a middle-aged editor and a younger working-class lover, was both blistering and revealing – it scarred my gentle readerly mind.

Around the same time, I was also reading The Scent of God by Saikat Majumdar, which explores romantic love between two young boys studying in a Hindu monastic boarding school. Both these novels intrigued me because, in all honesty, I had been a conventional reader with conservative sensibilities until then, who stuck to traditional genres. Another collection of queer writing from South Asia, On the Brink of Belief, changed the reader in me. The anthology carries the power of grief, loneliness, and vulnerability with striking clarity. In all these books, reading from the outside, I found myself drawn into their desires, hesitations, and the choices shaped by pressures I had not fully considered before.

These books also challenged some of the assumptions I had absorbed over time and helped me unlearn them. This is precisely why novels like Unfolding matter. They deepen our understanding and allow us to view these lives with the same openness and empathy we extend to everyone else.

It is easy to assume that emotional pressure from family – especially from parents – is something only straight people deal with, and that queer individuals are somehow more resolute in handling such situations. Unfolding unsettled that belief for me, exposing the limits of that assumption. Ralph and Ojas, the novel’s protagonists, move through heartbreak, wrestle with jealousy, and navigate the same emotional complexities that shape any relationship.

It becomes especially evident in their relationships with their families. Ojas, who comes from a conservative Marwari background, is weighed down by guilt over his identity each time he considers coming out, fearful of how his family might respond. Even as he struggles to hold together these conflicting emotions with determination, he remains devoted to Ralph. Singh handles these inner conflicts with restraint. It is this restraint that drew me into the prose and held me there.

Reading stories about queer characters in love has made one thing clear to me: love shows up in familiar ways, no matter who it is between. The gestures, the emotions, the awkward and tender moments – they’re no different from those in any other relationship. And there’s something genuinely comforting about that.

A subtle emotional thread flows through the narrative of Unfolding, surfacing even in the most ordinary scenes. A simple act like beating cake batter unexpectedly evokes a sense of love and ache for someone now distant. Singh captures these tender, fleeting stirrings with remarkable subtlety in the writing. Or, during Durga Pujo, Rahul and Ojas keep turning their cameras on each other, capturing moments even when the other resists being photographed. There’s something disarmingly intimate in this simple urge to keep each other in frame, however fleeting the moment may be. To me, these small, playful gestures capture love at its most unguarded and real. They also mirror the author’s approach to storytelling – honest, unpretentious, and free of affectation.

Love within tight spaces

Unfolding also shows what love looks like in working-class lives. Singh’s background in sociology seems to bring him closer to these lives, helping him write them with care. Through Zubina, a domestic worker in Rahul’s home, the novel shows a relationship shaped as much by circumstance as by emotion. “She didn’t know if love meant to perpetually be giddy with expectation; to crave more than the set hours and minutes of each day to be in the beloved’s presence…”

Her marriage to Aadil, a factory worker, began early, and with two young daughters, their lives leave little room beyond daily responsibilities. For Zubina, intimacy feels more like duty than choice, shaped by what marriage asks of her rather than what it might give. The limits of their one-room home, along with the pressure to get by, leave little space for love to be slow or expressive. What stayed with me was the simplicity – the way everything is laid bare, without fuss or ornament.

In the novels I’ve read with queer protagonists, love rarely comes easily. It is shaped – at times strained, at times strengthened – by hardship: emotional isolation, social resistance, political pressure, and often financial insecurity.

In Pajtim Statovci’s Bolla, Arsim, trapped in a loveless marriage, finds love in Miloš, a Serbian medical student, against the backdrop of the Kosovo War. Their relationship unfolds within violence, fear, and displacement, where war governs both their choices and their painful separation. What stands out in Bolla is how hardship is woven into the fabric of the story itself, making love feel both like refuge and risk.

Despite decades between Unfolding and Bolla, it is evident that love does not exist in a vacuum. It tries to carve out space for itself in environments that are not always welcoming. And yet, what stayed with me is not just the weight of these struggles, but the emotional resilience that emerges alongside them – the way love persists, adapts, and still finds expression even when the odds are stacked against it.

In his debut novel, Singh not only writes about queer and working-class lives, but also turns his attention to a version of Kolkata less commonly explored in contemporary fiction. Unfolding presents Kolkata that feels distinct from the ones I’ve encountered in recent reading. Many well-known contemporary novels set in the city – such as A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri and The Firebird by Saikat Majumdar – tend to dwell on a certain Bengali ethos, a certain Bengaliness rooted in the 1960s, ‘70’s and ‘80s, often intertwined with political turbulence, protest culture that lived parallelly with intellectualism and cultural vibrancy – of books, music, arts and theatre.

In contrast, Unfolding shifts the focus to the Marwari community – the non-Bengali mercantile population of the city – bringing a new sensibility and offering a perspective that feels less commonly explored in contemporary fiction based in Calcutta. The novel also steps into the world of cafes, pubs and bars, hinting at how the city’s social life has changed over time. Compared to the Kolkata evoked in the works of Chaudhuri and Majumdar, there is a noticeable shift in mood and setting in Singh’s writing. Having lived in Calcutta for a few years – and still returning often to spend time with friends and family – I found this perspective in Unfolding both new and refreshing.

Unfolding stays attentive to the uneven ways love is lived and negotiated across different lives. Its prose remains unpretentious, marked by an unassuming clarity that never strains for effect, allowing the emotional weight of the stories to emerge with remarkable ease.

Diya Sengupta is a strategy and consulting leader. She is the founder and co-curator of Juhu Reads and the co-curator of Pint of View Mumbai.

Unfolding: A Novel, Rahul Singh, HarperCollins India.