‘Mahmud And Ayaz’: An envelope-pushing novel that takes the past and the present head-on

In Mahmud and Ayaz, R Raj Rao’s titular characters paint a bleak picture of present-day India, one where the poor get poorer and minorities are silenced. Despite the heavy subject material, it’s a provocative, sexy, and playful read that treats characters as caricatures and acts as a larger experiment on how much an openly gay, openly left author can get away with today.

History as an affirmative source

Mahmud Fakhar is a young man who spends his days reading in the library, rubbing up on men on the Bombay train, and resisting the marriage his parents desperately want. But Mahmud is far from a floater and holds a simple, revolutionary goal: he has seen the brutality inflicted on Muslims in India under Modi and now wishes for good ol’ revenge. Ideally, terrorist revenge. So he studies for the IAS to get closer to power, where he hopes to enact all sorts of mayhem. But this plan is thwarted after a series of catastrophes hit Mahmud; his family is killed in a stampede, and cow-related lynchings get increasingly closer, culminating in a failure of his last IAS exam attempt.

With a tragic clean slate, he decides to embark on the scholarly pursuits of a PhD on the love...

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