Mahmud and Ayaz

Using the legendary love story of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and his Turkish slave-cum-lover Ayaz as the backdrop, Mahmud and Ayaz, set in contemporary Mumbai, tells the story of a young, casually radicalized Muslim man, Mahmud Fakhar, who has failed to qualify for the IAS where he had hoped to make a lot of money, but also to weaken the system from within and has barely managed a temporary teaching job in a second-rate college. At a loose end after his entire family dies in the 2015 Hajj stampede, he runs into a homeless Hindu lad, the illegitimate son of a tamasha dancer, hires him as his domestic servant, converts him to Islam, re-names him Ayaz, and begins an affair with him. It is the start of an unusual life together, and a series of journeys. Their travels take them to Somnath in the great Sultan s footsteps, and then to Kashmir, as they are drawn into a life of petty and not-so-petty crime and, almost, of militancy. After some odd adventures, the wheel comes full circle when their wayward life ends again in Mumbai, in the neighbourhood of Mahmud s birth, even as AIDS afflicts one of them. Narrated with irreverent, deadpan humour, R. Raj Rao s new novel is funny, subversive, provocative and wonderfully rude. It is unlike any love story gay or straight that Indian readers would expect.…