How to Date a Fanatic: A Novel

by Aruni Kashyap

In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country's political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.

Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Literary Fiction, India, Adult

354 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 14, 2026

About the author

Aruni Kashyap is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and the forthcoming How to Date a Fanatic. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. A 2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, he is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, the Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and the Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry.
His translations, which have been shortlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation and VOW Book Awards 2024, include The Bronze Sword of Tengphakhri Tehsildar by Indira Goswami (Zubaan), My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign by Anuradha Sarma Pujari (Penguin), An Illuminated Valley by Dipak Kumar Barkakaty (Penguin), and Ten Love Stories and a Story of Despair (Westland). He has served as a visiting writer at Lander University, Minnesota State University, Converse University, The College of William & Mary, Valdosta State University, Dibrugarh University, Assam Don Bosco University, and delivered the Tagore Lecture in Modern Indian Literature at Cornell University. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, Bitch Media, The Kenyon Review, The LitHub, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from the Northeast, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel, Noikhon Etia Duroit, and three novellas. He is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens.

Reviews

[Shefali · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

I enjoyed this book overall, but it felt very inconsistent to me. At times I was completely engaged while other times I felt like I was reading just to get through the book. I loved the vast representation of queer characters and the description of fundamentalist right-wing politics in India. And while I know this book isn’t meant to focus solely on romance, I found the relationship between Rohit and Dhruv exhausting and somewhat annoying. The last section of the book was my favorite. I appreciate NetGalley for allowing me to read this ARC!

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the Street Gets a Key
Aruni Kashyap’s “How to Date a Fanatic” and the Emergency Uses of Intimacy
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | July 10th, 2026

Dating a fanatic sounds like a joke with lipstick on its teeth, the kind of line that appears late in the evening when wine starts offering moral philosophy at a discount. In Aruni Kashyap’s “How to Date a Fanatic,” the phrase begins that way – as dating gossip, as a question asked over food, embarrassment, desire, and bad judgment. Then the joke follows the narrator into a car, waits beside a mob, notices the beef fry in the back seat, and becomes harder to laugh off: how does one keep loving, flirting, teaching, hiding, eating, and hoping when fanaticism has moved from slogan to street to bedroom?

Even before the novel has properly introduced its lovers, it has lowered Rohit and Minti into a rooftop water tank. Rohit, an Assamese professor newly returned to India after years in New York, and Minti, his friend, confidante, and sister-in-all-but-paperwork, are caught in riot violence near the University of Naalanda. Their driver, Satpal, hides them while armed men search below. The water is cold, then rising, then warm with the appalling suggestion that someone has switched on the motor. After this, ordinary things look newly suspect: every joke, date, meal, message, and ride may later have to answer to that darkness.

Much of the novel then rewinds to a wound without weapons. Rohit is in love with Dhruv, a handsome, maddening colleague who loves him intensely, just not in the way Rohit wants. This is the special cruelty Dhruv carries into the book: to cherish Rohit, confide in him, lean on him, perhaps even need him, while refusing the form of love that would let Rohit stop guessing. Rohit’s friends respond with the proper emergency kit – wine, food, mockery, loyalty, and bad advice delivered with the confidence of people who should know better. Sarfaraz, his childhood friend, and Minti, freshly wounded by the end of her own long relationship, turn heartbreak into a group project. In this novel, consolation usually arrives carrying a bottle and a theory.

Enter Karan, the first bad proof. Rohit’s date with him begins as queer social comedy: rooftop café, flirtation, the faintly academic pleasure of judging another person’s choices. Karan admits he is entangled with a closeted supporter of the Hindu right. Later, while driving Rohit home, the two men watch saffron-clad militants attack a Muslim family as police stand by. The beef fry Rohit has brought along shifts, in an instant, from leftover to evidence. To survive, he and Karan perform religious enthusiasm with the terrified awkwardness of men who know the theater is obscene and the ticket is their skin. The scene is funny in the way a laugh can become a cough when the air changes.

That car ride shows Kashyap’s book at its cleverest and most frightening. “How to Date a Fanatic” does not keep danger in speeches, newspapers, or rallies. It lets danger get into dinner, traffic, desire, and the etiquette of staying alive. A lover’s politics becomes a physical risk. A meal can accuse. A university shelters until it traps. A phone network fails precisely when tenderness needs a signal. A friend is family in every way except the way a hospital, police station, or university office may choose to count. Kashyap is sharpest when danger comes through ordinary objects: a roadblock, a rumor, a form, a locked gate, a missing shuttle.

Rohit, who narrates, is a blessedly inconvenient guide through all this. He is wounded, vain, clever, generous, frightened, class-prickly, tender, and able to notice his own failure just after committing it. His voice is not spare. It wanders, gathers, snacks, remembers, diagnoses, and doubles back. A date may detour through Delhi traffic, Assamese childhood, American graduate school, campus gossip, caste, class, food, and sexual embarrassment before returning, somewhat sheepishly, to the point. Readers who prefer their narrators lean may find him overpacked. Readers who like a mind with furniture, cupboards, and a few unsecured drawers will feel at home.

If one wanted company for this novel, one might place it near books where desire occupies rooms the state keeps entering: Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty,” Shyam Selvadurai’s “Funny Boy,” Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life.” Yet the resemblance only goes so far. Kashyap’s novel is warmer, looser, more crowded, less lacquered. It thinks through commotion: someone is cooking, someone is crying, someone is late, someone has posted foolishness online, someone has again loved the wrong man with impressive punctuality. The wit here is a household appliance, not a chandelier.

Perhaps the book’s most underdiscussed strength is its care that has to find a ride. Kashyap understands that queer community is not an inspirational noun but an exhausting verb. People bring wine after rejection. They share beds, rooms, passwords, lies, rides, and emergency plans. They pass as siblings to enter hospitals. They search camps and morgues. They keep calling. Love is not mainly declaration here. It is transport, tea, paperwork, shelter, gossip, and the decision to answer one more phone call when the previous ten have brought nothing useful.

A video appears. A blackmail threat returns. A party office, a court, a gate, a shuttle: the plot keeps finding channels through which harm can travel. Dhruv drifts into student politics, and a doctored clip appears to implicate him and others in anti-national speech. Sarfaraz’s past with Parag exposes sexual blackmail, class leverage, and the vulnerability of queer men who cannot rely on police, family, media, or reputation to vouch for them. Sayan, younger and steadier than Rohit first allows himself to see, becomes less a rebound than a rival model of love: quieter, less mythic, more available. Minti falls in love with Renuka and begins preparing to leave India. Around them, universities advertise liberal safety while depending on fragile labor, local resentment, and the comforting fantasy that privilege can lock the gate from inside.

Part of Kashyap’s sharpness comes from refusing Rohit the easy halo of danger. Rohit recognizes complicity because he is implicated in it. He judges Karan’s affair with a fanatic, yet survives by silence when violence unfolds before him. He wants Dhruv’s love, then resents the person who offers him something less theatrical and more durable. He can name cruelty in the system while still flinching like everyone else. Kashyap is too alert to embarrassment to let goodness stay clean. His people are not symbols first. They are hungry, desirous, jealous, brave at odd intervals, cowardly at others, and hard to sort into comfortingly separate piles.

Against surgical neatness, Kashyap chooses generous clutter. He likes lists, meals, routes, family stories, academic chatter, class discomfort, and the small humiliations of social ascent. One of his best instruments is food: beef fry, tea, curry, kebabs, wine, campus meals, packed groceries. None is table dressing. Food becomes flirtation, risk, comfort, memory, class marker, and cultural test. At times the sentences spread like guests who have not noticed the party has moved rooms. At their best, they give the sense that life keeps setting the table even as the street burns.

Down in the book’s design, the opening tank scene turns the middle chapters into pre-catastrophic evidence. The novel begins in Spring 2016 with riot danger, moves back through 2014 and 2015, then returns to the crisis before closing in Winter 2017. The named movements – Pakad, Sthayi, Antara, Tihai – quietly give shape to a book that might otherwise sprawl beyond discipline. By the time the water tank returns, Minti is no longer merely the woman beside Rohit in peril. She is his witness, comic counterweight, weather system, and proof that chosen kinship can be more binding than law and still less legible when the form demands blood.

In time, the title stops being a dating question and becomes a reckoning with daily loyalties. Dhruv wants a love beyond labels while withholding the mundane duties labels can require. Karan wants desire without ideological consequence. Rohit wants, for a long while, to be healed by being wanted. Sayan wants to be seen without competing with a ghost who still has a key. Minti and Renuka want a future the world has not built the paperwork to honor. These longings do not run beside the political plot. They live in the keys, bodies, documents, and doors where the political plot gets its hands dirty.

More than once, however, Kashyap explains what he has already put in the room. Rohit’s intelligence is one of the pleasures of the book, but it can become a pressure. He is so articulate about nationalism, online cruelty, liberal hypocrisy, class mobility, queer vulnerability, and violence that the novel occasionally tells us how to read moments whose objects have already done the harder work. The beef in the car needs no caption. The rising water needs no moral footnote. A missing woman whom institutions will not properly recognize as belonging to her beloved needs no lecture on recognition. The strongest pages trust the beef, the water, the empty shuttle.

If the ambition has a cost, it is this: almost every crisis passes through Rohit’s circle. Ideological compromise, mob violence, campus repression, queer blackmail, underground activism, riot survival, disappearance – all arrive with familiar names attached. This is defensible. Catastrophe does not remain national in scale; it comes home and sits down. Still, the compression can strain proportion, as though one friend group has been asked to host a country’s damage. The antagonists, too, are less interesting than the collaborators, bystanders, cowards, lovers, and survivors orbiting them.

The stitching is visible, but it belongs to a crowded, ambitious garment. Kashyap is trying to keep romantic comedy, campus novel, queer social portrait, political emergency, and disappearance narrative in one room without letting any mode evict the others. Often he manages it. A flirtation turns sour without snapping the scene in two; food becomes shame; a joke carries fear under its tongue. The jokes do not soften the danger. They clarify what danger threatens. A world without the parties, gossip, vanity, literary taste, and emergency wine would be easier to mourn and less painful to lose.

Rating the book on its own terms, I land at 86/100, which corresponds to 4/5 stars. That feels right: admiring, unswooning, alert to both force and strain. The novel is too alive in its rooms, too attentive to the labor of care, and too serious about the cost of fear to be treated as merely topical. It is also too discursive and occasionally too eager to interpret itself to sit in the very top tier. Its power lies less in perfect polish than in feeling, scene, and its willingness to keep Rohit implicated.

One of the novel’s most piercing presences is Minti. Or, more exactly, it is the structure of feeling around her: the jokes she makes, the rooms she fills, the romance she almost carries into another country, the bureaucratic absence into which she later falls. When she and Rohit escape the water tank and she intervenes to save Rajshree, the book briefly permits courage to look immediate and useful. Later, the shuttle sequence removes her from certainty. Rohit reaches safety. Sayan is there. Renuka is waiting. Minti is not. The cruelty is not operatic. It is administrative, logistical, almost blank.

Perhaps the cruelest reversal is the novel’s treatment of rescue. Satpal hides Rohit and Minti to save them, and nearly drowns them. Army boots, which belong to Minti’s childhood terror in Assam, become the sound she trusts. The shuttle meant to evacuate women becomes the vehicle from which she vanishes. Hope, by the end, is not a feeling events have earned. It is a practice maintained against the ledger. Renuka waits in Canada, arranging the life she and Minti meant to have. Rohit returns to Assam, teaches at Mayong College, loves Sayan imperfectly, answers calls, follows leads, and keeps the missing inside the grammar of the living.

Over time, even Rohit’s return to teaching is revalued. He once fled the provincial limitations of Mayong College, where English literature required translation into Assamese and patient explanation. By the end, that work no longer looks like defeat. It looks like a chastened form of service, a way to remain answerable to a place after the metropolitan centers have shown their own violence. Kashyap does not make this tidy. Rohit has not transcended heartbreak. Dhruv has not been solved. Minti has not been restored. The country has not become safer because one man has become more honest.

Under the romance, comedy, politics, and grief is the question of who keeps looking after the official story shrugs. That is where the last pages find their tenderness: not in consolation, but in a hand returning to the phone, a classroom reopened, a beloved’s name refused to the past tense, a search moving again through heat, rumor, paperwork, and dust.

Love, in this novel, is often ridiculous before it becomes noble, which is one reason it feels alive. It sulks, texts too much, buys the wrong food, misreads a glance, stages an intervention with wine, and decides, against all available evidence, that one more call may matter. Kashyap’s gift is to understand that these small absurdities are not beside the catastrophe. They are what catastrophe most wants to crush.

Of course, one could describe “How to Date a Fanatic” as a queer political novel about contemporary India, and that would be accurate, marketable, and insufficient. It is more precisely a novel about the emergency uses of intimacy: the small, faulty systems of mutual rescue people build inside a world that keeps cutting the wires. Its lasting images are practical and bodily: beef hidden in a car, a packet marked like a private joke, a phone without signal, a woman boarding a shuttle into the fog of the unaccounted-for, two friends in a tank listening to water rise.

Still, the final movement refuses the glamour of despair. It leaves Rohit not with certainty but with tasks: teach, love, answer, search, remember. That is a modest ending only if one has mistaken modesty for smallness. In Kashyap’s world, to keep a name active is to resist one kind of death. The water rises; someone still calls out from the dark; someone else, stubborn and frightened and not yet finished, keeps listening.

[Kyle C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rohit is an Assamese Indian academic with a PhD from America. He is bi, well-read, cosmopolitan in his life experience but, strangely, parochial in his life-goals and ambition. He teaches at Delhi University but has no desire to write or publish, and he is desperately in love with his friend Dhruv. He could become an academic in America; he could get a more prestigious, higher-paying job; he could also, just by virtue of his good looks and charisma, have a relationship with any number of men and women, but he prefers instead to give technical lectures on Petrarchan sonnets and obsessively think about Dhruv—the man who tells Rohit that he loves him more than anyone else, but can never love him in the way Rohit wants.

This is a book about messy, not necessarily tragic, queer lives. Rohit surrounds himself with supportive gay and lesbian friends: Minti, a lesbian therapist at the university whose girlfriend cheats on her after a decade of being together, and Sarfaraz, a model and a student with an erratic love life. After his falling out with Dhruv, Rohit dates a slew of younger men. Even though the novel is set around 2015 and Section 377 of the Indian penal code (the prohibition on sodomy) is still in effect, the characters seem to have built their own insular queer world, full of academics and professionals, and they seem largely removed from (and sometimes oblivious to) the rise of extremism around them. At the start of the novel, Rohit goes on a date with a man, Karan, who is in a complicated relationship with a married Hindu extremist (whose brother is a minister in Modi's government). When Karan breaks up with the man, he is blackmailed, then outed, and then ostracized by his family, who are forced to move to another state. Rohit sympathizes with Karan but, as the country descends into more extremism, he is still mostly preoccupied with Dhruv and trying to figure out how to be friends with a man he still pines for. Violence, civic unrest, homophobia, these are all peripheral to his emotional life (or maybe even blasé)—until suddenly they intrude into his life.

A few hundred meters from Rohit's apartment stands a church dedicated to St. Sebastian. It's a church that Rohit passes frequently in the novel. He argues with Dhruv in front of it. He looks at it in moments of crisis. After an outbreak of nationalist riots, he first notices that the church has been desecrated. St. Sebastian is, obviously, a queer-coded reference for many gay readers: the early Christian martyr who, in the Renaissance, became an icon of homoerotic beauty and suffering, his lithe, nude body slung to a tree and riddled with arrows. Rohit is not a tortured gay man but he is in therapy and he struggles to form meaningful intimacy with the men he dates. As the novel unfolds, India regresses into illiberalism and extremism. Modi's party is consolidating power across the country; Rohit's state is breaking apart as the majority Jat population riots for recognition as a "backwards" people (which would grant them access to affirmative policies—government benefits, employment preference). And Rohit's friends are caught up in this political chaos: Sarfaraz is beaten up; Dhruv is charged with sedition; Minti disappears.

While set in an era in which sodomy is outlawed and in a country where homosexuality is still heavily stigmatized, the novel has a surprisingly 'post-gay' sensibility. None of the queer characters in this novel struggle with their identity per se—coming out is undoubtedly a risk and many of the characters must be discreet with their families, and yet they are internally comfortable with their sense of self and with each other. St Sebastian for Rohit is not—as it is for many gay writers of the 20th century—a symbol of queer loneliness and persecution. Rather, what Rohit sees in St. Sebastian is perhaps a more complicated kind of suffering: Rohit and his queer friends are all struggling with the familiar hardships of relationships (intimacy, honesty, fidelity) as their country shifts rightward and as leftwing politics becomes dangerous and school campuses—often a queer refuge—become unsafe. They must navigate queerness in a nation split by religious and ethnic upheaval and conflict.

I can understand why some early reviews question the pacing and structure of the novel. At times, this novel can be painfully tedious and messy—like the queer characters who inhabit it. Rohit is 35 but, like many queer people who delay the formative experiences of teenage relationships and might never have dreamed of the possibility of marriage, he seems stuck in an adolescent stage of immaturity, not sure how to date (let alone date a fanatic) and not sure what a queer future would look like for him. He spends much of his time like a brokenhearted teenager agonizing over whether Dhruv loves him, whether Dhruv is sabotaging him, whether Dhruv is a true friend, whether Dhruv will fall in love with him if he can just make him jealous. Rohit teaches high-brow Indian literature (Amitav Ghosh and Indira Goswami) but his mind seems to be more fixated on relationship drama and he has to keep reminding himself that life is not like a Danielle Steel novel or a Bollywood romcom: Dhruv won't suddenly fall in love with him. A bisexual, Assamese, first-gen graduate, contracted lecturer, Rohit was never going to live according to a tidy narrative template.

Overall, I enjoyed it and would recommend it. Thank you to the publishers for the advance copy.

[Nick Artrip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I requested and received an eARC of How to Date a Fanatic by Aruni Kashyap. As political tensions rise across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught up in a web of unrequited love for his friend Dhruv. To alleviate himself of the heartbreaking, Rohit seeks out other men in the city, until he meets and embarks on a relationship with Sayan, a literature student. Rohit's life soon becomes more complicated as country's political tensions erupt on campus and spark a student-led movement, with Dhruv swept up in the fray. Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and joys of queer life in order to survive the uncertain political landscape.

Reading How to Date a Fanatic was a real treat. There's something very appealing about Rohit as a protagonist, perhaps that he comes across as more cynically queer than some. I found the push-and-pull in his friendship with Dhruv fascinating, and I think it really speaks to the experiences of many queer men. We've all at one point or another been drawn to the unattainable. But their banter and the undeniable spark between them, the thing that makes their friendship so complicated, felt very real to me. And that was initially what attracted me to the story. Kashyap gives his queer characters vibrant, meaningful lives. Many of them carry around the scars of homophobia, but they also have joyously passionate existences. There were several scenes that really tore at my heart, while others left me chuckling.

How to Date a Fanatic is more than just a story about one queer man’s for connection, it is also a novel about political and cultural upheaval. As Modi’s party gains power, Rohit and his friends find their lives changed dramatically. This was both informative, emotional and occasionally difficult to read. While the beginning of the novel is a bit slower and centers around Rohit’s relationship with Dhruv and is inability or unwillingness to commit to anything deeper with the men that enter his life, the second half speeds by as the characters find themselves in jeopardy. It doesn’t change the tone of the novel, because we’re aware from the beginning that things aren’t going to be all sunshine, but I do think it gives the novel greater weight. The ending really stuck with me. Rohit, Minti, Dhruv, and Sarfaraz each carved out a little space in my heart, I won’t be forgetting them anytime soon.

[Sharmaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had me staring into the void, contemplating the ugly yet beautiful moments of life.

It is a book that takes place from early 2014-2016 in India, and it follows Rohit, a young, bisexual professor who studied in the US and returned to India to teach English Literature, and his experience with queer romance in a time of political upheaval.

It's hard for me to rate a book like this because it's a story so rooted in reality, that it's hard for me to quantify it's worth. If anything, I would say it is a devastating, yet sometimes heartwarming story about friendship, queerness, and survival. It is a story about holding on to those who are dear to you, cherishing the small moments, and persevering and loving in the most darkest moments.

The one thing that made it a less than 5 star read for me was the disjointedness of the narrative. Sometimes the narrator is in the present and all of the sudden there will be a flashback with little to no transition, so it sometimes made the reading confusing. But aside from that, I found the overall narrative structure to be easy to follow.

Thank you to HarperVia for sending me an ARC of this novel. It was truly a gutting read.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unrequited love will always draw me near a book.

We are following Rohit who returns from the states back home to India where he starts teaching. He accidentally fell in love with his best friend Dhruv and Dhruv does not feel the same… or so it seems. Rohit wants to get over him so he starts dating around and ends up dating Sayan-a lit student. Sayan is confident, kind, and knows that he wants Rohit.

Of course things are complicated, but on top of it all there is political unrest amongst the campus where Rohit works and he finds himself in the middle of it all.

I really enjoyed this novel. I found it compelling, heart breaking, maddening, and there were moments where I felt like I was a part of this friend group.

I do think there are some pacing issues, but if you’re looking for a character driven book following our bisexual main character set in a very tense political climate… this will be for you.

Thank you NetGalley and Harper Audio for the ALC!

[Ryan Brandenburg · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of this book piqued my interest, but unfortunately, its execution fell short.

Author Aruni Kashyap intricately weaves the narrative of Rohit and his companions and romantic entanglements in contemporary India. While certain aspects of Rohit’s journey intrigued me, I found it challenging to connect with any of the characters. Additionally, the book suffered from an overwhelming number of storylines that made it difficult to follow.

The storyline had the potential to be compelling, and the writing was strong. However, the delivery could have been improved by having a smoother flow between the plot points. Additionally, it occasionally veered off course, which ultimately hindered my enjoyment of the book.

I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher, HarperVia, for providing me with an advanced copy of the book. It is scheduled to be published on July 14, 2026.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll write a longer review when I'm done crying.
-
We follow Rohit from 2014-2016, during a tumultuous time in India and a return to conservatism and religious segregation, putting many Muslims in tenuous or dangerous situations. But during any time of upheaval, people continue to live their regular lives. Rohit is part of the queer community, and know the boundaries with his friends and lovers regarding their safety.

The title question applies to multiple people we meet in Rohit's life, and there are different outcomes and consequences for each, including for Rohit. We meet the colorful cast of his life - best friends Minti (queeeeen I love her so much) and Sarfaraz (who you will want to hug through the page), friend but more than a friend boundary crusher Dhruv, lover Sayan, as well as activist and militant groups that are impacting their lives and the lives of people they care about.

Rohit is just trying to find security and be true to himself, be an excellent friend (which he really, really is) and survive a world where his identities keep him on the edge of danger. A beautiful book about friendship and the many ways we can love, it will have you gasping in the end.

[Lynn Krueger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to @harperviabooks for sending me the physical arc as well as the finished copy of this lovely book! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨

What starts as a love story with Indian politics as a backdrop slowly transforms into an utterly fascinating tale of the tumultuous political situation in India and what happens to all the characters we’ve followed since page one.

This was a unique book and I loved it. I would maybe put this down as a contemporary-historical fiction, as I feel like I learned a great deal about India in 2014-2016 that I never knew.

I adored all of the characters, except Dhruv who is a bit of an antagonist as the MC Rohit is in love with him but it is unrequited. Dhruv is that kind of toxic that says “I don’t want you” but then behaves in awful ways to drive other potential partners away. I did love the found family friend group and the character development was well done.

[Mariah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⛤ This book was not the rom-com I blindly expected it to be, which left me happily surprised. Kashyap nailed the feelings and thoughts behind unrequited feelings for a friend; both how difficult it is to constantly overcome and how much you grow as a person after it. I loved Rohit and his cast of friends but sometimes I felt the plot dragged at times. I have zero context for the political climate of North India in the mid 2010s, so I had to do some reading up on Wikipedia to get the full sense and got a little lost here and there. The historical fiction angle was well-done though and I felt very immersed by the last couple chapters.

[Kristia Peschka]

DNF @ 55%

Good Lord am I bored! I've tried so hard to push through. But the interesting parts to dull incredibly boring parts is too much. I don't know what this book was attempting to do. But we spend a lot of time just reading the most random conversations between these characters that don't move the story forward. Think of the random chat you have with your partner on a Tuesday after work about how your day went when nothing of note happened, and that's a large part of this book.

I found myself skimming just to get through, so I'm stopping now.

[Lydia Hephzibah]

Dnf

Setting: india
Rep: gay Indian protagonist; Indian author

I've tried three times with this book and I just cannot get into it, the writing is doing nothing for me so despite the premise sounding right up my street, it's time to call it quits.

[Luna and Co · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a little while to get into this one. At first, I thought maybe it would be a DNF, but by the end, I didn't want it to end. The pacing was a little wacky, but once you get past it... This book is an experience. The political aspect was more present than I expected, but it added interesting dimensions to the story. As a queer Canadian, reading about queer characters in India felt like discovering a new universe.

Thank you, Netgalley and HarperAudio Adult for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review

[Michael B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is deeper than the books I usually read, but it was a great change of pace. We follow Rohit and his life as an instruction in higher education in India. Struggling with his unrequited love for Dhruv and the dangerous political unrest of the region, this book gives the reader a lot to think about.

This is a story about navigating dangerous political movements while still being yourself, and it is very much worth taking a moment to read it. This book is going to stick with me for a while.

[gracie · Rating 5 out of 5]

'How to Date a Fanatic' is a beautiful book that manages to avoid my major issue with a lot of contemporary litfic from authors of colour, and that's the dumbing down/over-explanatory writing of cultural practices, politics and way of living of these communities for the Western audience. Kashyap has written and presented a completely insular view of the India that our protagonist experiences, with his friends and family and community. As a Nigerian bisexual, the queerness aspect was really familiar to me living in a country where we're criminalized also. There's a level of internalized freedom that Rohit and his friends have in regards to their sexuality that comes through the page even while they're still very much avoiding being outed and that's quite similar to what I experience here with other queer people.

I also really enjoyed a more first person view into the abhorrent state of politics and insurgency in India. It was a very important part of the book, especially seeing Rohit's decision to come back home to teach and him still having hope in the country despite being on the endangered end of the violence. Once again an experience I heavily connect with. This was such an amazing read, thank you HarperAudio for the arc!

[Janine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contemporary fictional story of love and connection set in India at a time of political unrest and polarization.

Rohit, a professor in Delhi, is in love - that is, unrequited love - with his friend, Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks out others in the hope of connection and love. When he finds literature student, Sayan, he hopes he’s found his new love. But soon political unrest and campus uprising intervenes and Rohit finds himself with Dhruv as he joins the fray. The political unrest adds an atmosphere of indecision complicating Rohit’s life. As the unrest continues Rohit and his friends debate the impact it could have on them. Then Rohit learns Dhruv is in hiding before he and others he was with surrender to the police. As the unrest slowly dies down, Rohit starts questioning his connections. He decides to return to Assam to accept a position at Mayong College because Delhi holds too many memories and pain. But the overarching question is whether Rohit has ever lost hope in those turbulent times. As he acknowledges at the end: “Hope is all we have. Without hope, we are nothing. . . . Hope is a decision.”

This is a witty, irreverent book but at its heart is a deep analysis of friendship and what drives us to carry on in spite of things. I enjoyed learning about life in political India - I learned there is much universality (no surprise) in global views because skin color, religion and sexuality are meaningless. We are all the same underneath. I think that’s the beauty of this nicely written, very readable book.

My thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for allowing me to read this. ARC.