All Our Evenings is a slow, claustrophobic confession novel about Arjun, a middle-aged Hyderabad man whose life has been frozen since one violent summer in adolescence. It wants to be a novel about first love, class, caste, family disgrace, queer desire, guilt, memory, parental complicity, social cruelty, and the lives that remain stuck after one irreversible act. Mostly, it is a grimly over-controlled spiral of repetition: Red House, papaya tree, water tank, cricket bat, Ganesh, Ruhee, father, mother, Sunday, shaving kit, hospital. The book keeps circling its traumatic secret until the secret no longer feels like a revelation but like machinery.
The novel opens with the Red House, an unfinished mansion on a dead-end street, abandoned because of litigation and surrounded by thornbushes, grass, rust, exposed stairs, and local superstition. It is the kind of symbolic building that announces itself immediately: half-built, haunted, legally suspended, socially avoided, exactly like Arjun’s life. The present-day Arjun still lives with his parents, works in a municipal water office far below his education and class background, comes home in damp socks smelling of chlorine, and lets his mother pretend he is some kind of respectable manager. His life is small, ritualized, and stagnant.
Then his mother tells him she has run into Ruhee, the girl from his childhood, now a doctor back in Hyderabad after years in Udupi. Arjun once loved Ruhee when they were children, kissed her when they were young, and then met her again at sixteen, during the summer his father left the family for Gita Miss, Arjun’s Sanskrit teacher. That summer, Arjun also met Ganesh at the gymkhana. Ganesh was older, muscular, barefoot, poor-looking, intense, tribal by birth, a former child laborer and orphanage child taken into a wealthy household. Arjun introduced Ganesh to Ruhee, expecting to remain the true center of Ruhee’s attention. Instead Ganesh and Ruhee became lovers.
