India, March 14 -- When a novel opens with a man nonchalantly unzipping and urinating onto the stone floor of the small house he shares with two other men, the reader tends to sit up and take notice. The first page of Ranbir Sidhu's Night in Delhi shares much with Anubha Yadav's The Anger of Saintly Men (2021) in that both books offer a frank, unsentimental exploration of the lives and minds of men. It is also worth comparing Sidhu's novel in terms of how it uses its setting with Anita Desai's In Custody (1984). While the latter depicts a decaying postcolonial capital, the decrepitude of Sidhu's city is a consequence of neoliberal capitalism.

This Delhi is far removed from both the monuments of the past as well as the glitzy skylines of ...