India, March 21 -- Saikat 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 (Hachette, 2015), with its child protagonist Ori who comes to hate the stage with a blinding rage, leading him to arson. The novel 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 ...