One summer in the rural landscape of Bengal, 16-year-old Mallar, a shy and introspective boy, takes every opportunity to slip away from home and hang around his best friend’s mango orchard nearby. Armed with the excuse of helping harvest the fruits, the teenager sneaks furtive glances, and makes secret drawings in his sketchbook, his crush on his friend’s handsome older brother growing to sometimes ecstatic, and sometimes heartbreaking proportions the way only first loves can. This is Unlove Story (Seagull, ₹599), by Bengaluru-based writer and data scientist Sudipto Pal – translated by Arunava Sinha from Pal’s Bengali novel Bhalo Na Basar Galpo.
‘I wander madly around the forest / Driven by own scent, there and here / Like a musk deer’, read the opening lines, a translation of a Tagore poem, setting the scene for what is to follow. Pal explains, “Mallar imagines Srijan as Krishna and himself as a kind of devotee to Krishna. So he is developing his attraction in a very poetic way, like many Bengali young men whose way of expressing love happens through poems.”
A few summers later, as Mallar’s attraction begins to be reciprocated and the pair stumble into a steamy encounter, perhaps scared of the enormity of his feelings, Srijan proposes a strange arrangement – a promise not to love but ‘unlove’ each other. “That pact of not loving, or ‘unloving’, is not something usual in a love story. Loving someone needs a lot of effort but unloving possibly needs more; the redemption doesn’t come through [reciprocated] love,” explains Pal.
The novel initially started off as a short story, ending with the pair making this unconventional pact, but the questions and curiosity raised in his readers compelled Pal to continue writing. He recalls, “I started writing for a Bengali queer literary group and it started getting attention. They kept asking me, what next?” As a novel, the book is divided into four sections, following the pair as they grow older and move from rural Bengal to Mahabalipuram, Bengaluru, and even Paris. Mallar’s sketches of Srijan’s body move from the private confines of his sketchbook to galleries, while Srijan follows the ‘straight’ path – getting married to a woman. As the two meet in each of these places, their pact creates tension – a push and pull as feelings resurface, dynamics shift, and Mallar becomes increasingly unsettled by their ‘unloving’ arrangement.
It is this shifting balance of power between the characters that Pal thinks may be the reason why his readers have resonated with the story. “It is not an educational book on what a same-sex love story is like. It’s about going with the characters on their journey. Thereon, you feel their emotions and everyone can see a part of themself in the characters, irrespective of their sexual orientation or their gender,” says Pal.