A portrait of Delhi in-between: liminal, restless, and uncertain
In Night in Delhi (2025), Ranbir Sidhu lays bare the city of shadowlands, and of lives pushed to the margins of visibility and worth, as it exists in continuum alongside the bright and aestheticized metropolis.
The opening scene of Ranbir Sidhu’s Night in Delhi (Context, 2025) sets the tone for what is to come: one man nonchalantly unzips and urinates onto the stone floor of a cramped house, while another, the unnamed protagonist, watches him with a mix of disgust and desire. In this stark and intimate moment, Sidhu signals the novel’s refusal to flinch, to look away from the bodily, the brutal, the banal. What follows is a swift descent into a Delhi that is rarely part of the shining vision of ‘India’. Sidhu lays bare the city of shadowlands, and of lives pushed to the margins of visibility and worth, as it exists in continuum alongside the bright and aestheticized metropolis.
Neither of the protagonists are heroes. Nor are they villains. They are the rugged figures we pass on the street, those who labour in whatever way they can to survive, day by day, moment by moment. They do not aspire to morality, nor are they concerned with redemption. What animates their lives are two relentless desires, love and survival, often indistinguishable, often in conflict, always urgent but always apparent.
Night in Delhi is an unflinching exploration of the lives of working-class queer men in Delhi and of a city that lies beyond and behind its much-fronted aesthetics: its monuments, its nostalgia for old city, for the Parathe Wali Gali and Fakirchand bookstore, and the fleeting charm of brisk auto rides under light rains.
Grief here is not only personal; it is structural. It exposes the fragility of love at the margins, and the ease with which dreams, bodies, and relationships are swallowed by the city’s indifferent hunger.
This is not the Delhi of travel brochures or heritage walks. Nor is it the city of gleaming metro lines and glass towers that promise a neoliberal tomorrow. This is a Delhi in-between: liminal, restless, uncertain. A shadow city with chasms that yawn ever wider between the haves and the have-nots.
Sidhu writes, “He smells of the streets, of age and heartbreak and corruption, as if its very essence has found a home inside him,” (21) and again, “along with the sugar, I can taste the city on her, its smell and soot.” (58) His Delhi is deformable, pliable, and alive in the most bodily sense. It clings to the skin in the form of dust and grime collected from meandering through its narrow gullies; it lingers in the taste of sweat and semen, exchanged in hurried, anonymous acts of longing. It is both tactile and elusive. At times, the city becomes a blanket, one that engulfs and disappears its people, often at their own request. In this act of vanishing lies both refuge and erasure.
Narratively, Night in Delhi unfolds in the first person, through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist who is a small-time hustler, a petty thief, a prostitute and, crucially, an astute and tender lover. The story orbits the narrator’s love for Jaggi, a charismatic drag performer he meets in a dilapidated underground queer club. Since that night, they become inseparable. Jaggi gradually becomes the protagonist’s pimp, not out of coercion, but out of a shared dream and necessity. Their relationship defies easy categorization; it’s not exploitative, though it exists in a transactional world. Together, they nurture a fragile hope: to one day escape this relentless city, move to a quiet beach town in South India, and build a life of peace, far from the grind of the city.
For now, though, the two live with Basam, a grifter of sorts, in a cramped, decaying room in Paharganj. Basam offers them a roof, not out of generosity but because they pay his share of the rent. The protagonist also steals for him, slipping easily between care and survival, affection, and obligation. This house, like the city, is bursting at the seams with overlapping intimacies, dependencies, and betrayals. It is Basam who later puts an end to their love story by murdering Jaggi.
Our unnamed narrator—adrift in the surrounding chaos—finds himself trapped in a vicious loop of intimacy and alienation, a cycle that becomes even more acute, almost crystallized, after Jaggi’s passing. Grief here is not only personal; it is structural. It exposes the fragility of love at the margins, and the ease with which dreams, bodies, and relationships are swallowed by the city’s indifferent hunger.
There is a certain madness, a feverish frenzy, that the novel builds its Delhi upon, one that inevitably ensnares those already teetering at the edges. Sidhu conjures a city that does not simply exclude, but consumes its margins, digesting and erasing them. And yet, in that erasure, a strange kind of clarity emerges. Sidhu’s protagonist often utilizes this erasure to rob. “Her eyes pass through me as I approach. Not only am I invisible, I don’t exist, I might as well be dead, a ghost, a spirit in the air…. she registers me as a non-entity, if she registers me at all…I walked inside, the purse under my shirt pressed against my belly.” (12) The novel offers a bird’s-eye view of the city’s competing dreams; dreams of arrival, of escape, of wealth, of safety, of being seen. But these dreams do not coexist peacefully.
The Delhi in Sidhu’s novel is the very condition of possibility and plight for the protagonist’s life and choices. Its underbelly produces a space where love and survival collapse into one another, but it also dictates the limits of both. The protagonist steals because the city pushes him to the margins, rendering him invisible, hustles because formal work is foreclosed to him, loves Jaggi fiercely because tenderness is fleeting under such precarity. Delhi here functions almost like a ruthless arbiter, granting temporary refuge but ultimately demanding sacrifice. In this sense, the purpose of this shadow city is to strip away illusions—that survival can be clean, that love can be apolitical, that modernity can be achieved without producing waste lives. By placing us in this city, Sidhu confronts us with uncomfortable questions: what kinds of compromises must the marginalised make just to stay alive, and what does it mean for the rest of us that their disposability underwrites our visions of a prosperous, ‘world-class’ capital?
What unfolds is not simply a story of queer love or survival, it is a layered narrative of how structural inequalities mediate even the most intimate moments. Sex in this novel is not always pleasure; it is sometimes pain, sometimes power. Often, it is both. And in these grey spaces, Sidhu refuses to offer judgment. The protagonist isn’t seeking redemption. He’s just trying to stay alive. Stealing, hustling, making love, enduring violence; where his every act is a negotiation with a world that has already cast him and his likes aside.
Night in Delhi illuminates the cost of survival and forces us to ask: Whose dreams are allowed to flourish, and whose must be extinguished for that to happen? More often than not, one person’s vision of Delhi, or India for that matter, requires the death of another’s. The prosperity of some is built on the disposability of others. The happiness of some is built on the mourning of others. Night in Delhi is a searing, unsentimental portrayal of life on the margins, one that neither moralizes nor romanticizes. It is noir in the truest sense: gritty, unsparing, and unapologetically raw.
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Anjali Chauhan is a feminist researcher and writer based in Delhi, India, currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science, University of Delhi. You can find her on Instagram: @happily_femme and X: @chauhananjali98.
