India, March 15 -- When a novel opens with a man nonchalantly 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 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 a liminal, uncertain place, a shadow city; sleazy, suffocating and with widening chasms between the haves and the have-nots....