Forms etched in water

Aikat Majumdar is a novelist of forbidden passions. And sometimes of the violence associated with them.

- Maaz Bin Bilal

Aikat Majumdar is a novelist of forbidden passions. And sometimes of the violence associated with them. While he is increasingly labelled as a novelist of (queer) desire, the passions in Majumdar's novels are multifarious and go beyond sexual desire too. Hitherto, my favourite Majumdar novel was Firebird (2015), with its child protagonist Ori who comes to hate the stage with a blinding rage, leading him to arson. It had appealed for its sheer force of character in its main protagonist, also exposing us to the potential for evil in childhood.

Majumdar's next novel, The Scent of God (2019), was about boyhood too, an intimate friendship between boys with homoerotic undertones, set in a spiritual mission school. His prime characters seemed to have grown up by Majumdar's subsequent work of fiction, The Middle Finger (2022), which explored personal relations in a university setting. It was here, that Majumdar's experiments with language and an intricate poetics to represent passion came to the fore with the protagonist, Megha.