The Light at the End of the World is Siddhartha Deb’s third novel. The novel moves spatially from the center (New Delhi) to the “light” emerging from an edge of the Indian republic—the Andaman Islands. A heterotemporal novel, The Light at the End of the World goes back from near future Delhi to 1984, 1947, and 1859: all key moments in colonial and postcolonial Indian history. Walter Benjamin’s depiction of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, in his ninth thesis on history, serves as an opening epigraph to the novel. Benjamin’s treatment of “nature-history” in The Origins of German Tragic Drama also gives us a key to reading the structure of the novel. In Benjamin’s mode of inquiry, nature is dialectically entwined with history. Both nature and history are subjected to ruin, and in The Light at the End of the World, both national history and the degradation of the atmosphere are viewed as ruins: the debris of “progress” accumulating in front of the angel’s horrified face, as his wings are caught in the storm blowing from paradise.

The Light at the End of the World draws on multiple generic registers: science fiction, horror, speculative fiction and, most importantly, the weird. In a weird coincidence, I finished reading Deb’s novel in May 2023, when wildfire smoke had engulfed New York in an “apocalyptic” haze. The first part of Deb’s novel is titled “City of Brume” and deals with a near future scenario when a permanent smoky haze engulfs Delhi. I emphasize weird as a key term because it captures an affective state, a genre, and a mode simultaneously. There are the weird atmospheres in The Light at the End of the World that accentuate dread, paranoia, and anxiety: for instance, the constant backdrop of a smoky haze in Delhi that makes the world feel out of joint and that insinuates that there are entities hidden by the brume that the characters cannot discern properly.

Generically, Deb’s novel draws on the Lovecraftian and “new weird” traditions. One central tenet of this genre aids in interpretating The Light at the End of the World. On the one hand, Deb allegorizes the consolidation of power by the Hindu right in India through the depiction of a shadowy secret society that moves from the margins to the center in the five sections of the novel; on the other hand, the central character, Bibi, finds the light at the end of the world—in this case, the Andaman islands—while walking through the “ruins” of a failed Third Worldist utopian project, the Nehruvian-era Shankar’s International Dolls Museum at ITO, New Delhi. Walking through non-Euclidean architectures is a classic Lovecraftian scenario. In Lovecraft, corners in buildings lead to a horrific, abyssal beyond; meanwhile, in Deb’s novel, the farthest corner of the museum opens a line of flight from the iron cage of the nation-form for Bibi. Incidentally, Benjamin’s angel appears to Bibi as an image in the sky at the close of the novel, as she drifts into a no-man’s zone, a “nameless island” in the Andamans archipelago. From the edges, one can view the ruins and ruinations wrought by the nation-state.

But the weird is also a mode for reading the depiction of the Anthropocene in The Light at the End of the World. In my review of the novel, I tried to capture this mode via a double articulation: The air in Deb’s novel is metaphorically and literally weird. “Nature” too is ruined and available for reading as ruins. Just as Mark Fisher argues in The Weird and the Eerie that the weird is an intrusion from the outside, Deb (in one of his essays in Twilight Prisoners) deems that the apocalyptic gas leak on December 2, 1984, in Bhopal, India, is an “alien visitation.”

This leak, moreover, is an act of unparalleled “atmo-terrorism.” A term by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, atmo-terrorism captures how elemental substances like air are changed, utterly, by lethal elements like gas in the epoch of the Anthropocene. But atmo-terrorism need not only be an “exceptional” event like Bhopal 1984, but also a banalized, quotidian index of slow violence: Delhi’s air quality is routinely listed as one of the worst in the world, a reality extrapolated out, in The Light at the End of the World, to a possible future Delhi with an AQI of 689 (and rising). While indices like AQI visualize the air, that same air manifests in the body as well: the persistent coughs that individuals and populations suffer from in the novel, and in reality.

When the smokocalypse hit NYC in late May 2023, I saw a weird-ish meme circulated on social media that compared NYC, the city of brume, juxtaposed with a shot of the hazy atmospherics of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Maybe the Anthropocene is best described as weird, and maybe the vanguard of the representing the weird Anthropocene are novels like The Light at the End of the World.

Amit Baishya (AB): Let me begin with a question on narrative technique. All your three novels adopt very different narrative styles and viewpoints. The Point of Return alternates between first- and third-person perspectives, in a very Sebaldian take on memory and place. An Outline of the Republic deploys the form of the quest narrative, with clear Conradian echoes.

Now, The Light at the End of the World is a multivocal and multigeneric text. On the one hand, you predominantly employ third-person narration; on the other hand, in the Bhopal section, you use first-person narration (from the perspective of a Hindu fundamentalist assassin).

Could you tell us about your choice of these modes and forms of narration? What purpose do they serve in the novels?

Siddhartha Deb (SD): The way to tell a story is central to my visualizing and conceptualizing a narrative, and I come at it from a mix of perspectives. I studied literature in graduate school and also had the experience of being a working journalist. But I’m also cobbling together a bastard, unparented literary trajectory of my own. I don’t feel connected to mainstream South Asian writing, especially in English, or to mainstream Anglo-American fiction. And so each novel is always a new project, somewhat experimental, building on earlier obsessions but departing from them formally.

The Light at the End of the World was written over seven, eight years, a time during which I wanted to find the right form for what I felt to be an enormously complex world inside my head, with experiences, ideas, and influences accumulated over decades. In writing the novel, I wanted to challenge simplistic ideas of past and present and future; but, at the same time, I didn’t want the story to be boring for the reader, just a theory-novel, all concept, no execution. I’m interested in the various pleasures of narrative—plot and character, the things that theory or the avant-garde often dismiss—while also realizing that I’ve never been able to attach myself completely to linearity or to just one character’s biographical arc. All this determined the arrangement of the various novellas, the various narratives, and the storytelling modes in each section. I wanted the characters, the protagonists, to be different from each other. For the styles to be different from each other.

I wanted a novel embracing multiple storytelling forms and the pleasure of these storytelling forms. And this was because, of course, some of what was being depicted was dark and violent. And the counterpoint to that, for me, was in the joy offered by the different modes of storytelling.

AB: How would you describe the connections between your fiction and nonfiction? How do they co-shape and interact with each other?

More specifically, let’s consider your treatment of Bhopal in your nonfiction. You write in a journalistic, realist register about Bhopal in The Beautiful and the Damned. However, you use science fictional and weird references in your essay “An Alien Visitation” when you revisit Bhopal in Twilight Prisoners. There is the epigraph from Geoff Dyer’s Zona that begins the essay: “A caption: some kind of meteorite or alien visitation has led to the creation of a miracle: the Zone. Troops were sent in and never recovered. It was surrounded by barbed wire and a police cordon … ” Your essay concludes thus: “The Anderson they want to hang is an evil thing, a meteorite, an alien visitation.”

These references to “meteorite” and “alien visitation” reminded me of Mark Fisher’s observation, which I will talk about more in the next question, that the weird brings to the familiar something from the outside, an alien visitation as it were. How do essays like “An Alien Visitation” dialogue with works like The Light at the End of the World?

SD: I first went to Bhopal on the 20th anniversary of the Union Carbide disaster—the worst industrial accident in the world, and utterly forgotten, including in India and in the United States, the two powers culpable for this disaster—on a straightforward feature assignment. Straightforward in the sense that like a lot of my nonfiction, it was fact driven, it was a reporter’s assignment. I approach these projects in a fairly direct manner, because I’m working with editors and I have word counts and deadlines and I need to get paid in order to survive. There’s all this very careful, scrupulous research and fact checking, a certain high standard of professionalism you have to bring to the work, and I appreciate all that. Still, there are also clearly demarcated, if unspoken, boundaries around such assignments, boundaries that map on very closely to empire and capital, to race and to class.

In these commissioned nonfiction pieces, I don’t talk very much about capitalism or colonialism or class or the body. And yet, these things are of great interest to me, and even though they are constantly brought up by the reporting, they have to be mostly left out of the piece itself. But then all this violence, pain, trauma sits with you, becomes decomposed, forms deeper and deeper layers, there’s all this residue: and that’s the material that expresses itself in my fiction.

So, although Bhopal shows up in nonfictional form in the opening of The Beautiful and the Damned and again in Twilight Prisoners, it is such a deep wound for me that I felt I wasn’t done with it by writing about Bhopal in nonfictional form, that there were connections and nuances yet to be teased out. For instance, after the numbness of my reporting engagement with the Union Carbide factory, I was watching Stalker for the first time. And I remember, within the initial twenty minutes of the film, telling my friend, “That’s the Union Carbide factory.” Something terrible has happened there, like the other terrible things that have happened in India and around the world, and now fiction has to make sense of it.

In Bhopal, subaltern people trying to make sense of the disaster would say to me, “Oh, this was a ghost, this was a djinn, this was an evil spirit.” The elites in India look down on this—the neoliberal elites of course, but even the left. But for me, that folk knowledge spoke somehow to the speculative fiction of the Strugatsky brothers and their novel Roadside Picnic, and to Tarkovsky’s adaptation of the novel into Stalker. And so the incredible modernity-inflected vision of their science fiction could provoke my sudden understanding of the Bhopal disaster as both this capitalist disaster and also this evil, alien thing. Warren Anderson, the CEO of Union Carbide, officially wanted for extradition by India and living out a completely unrepentant suburban life in Florida, is both the white, corporate American who doesn’t really comprehend what happened in Bhopal and doesn’t ultimately care, but also, like something out of The X Files, an extra-terrestrial creature, an alien visitation.

I am very struck by how alien the Anthropocene can seem. On the one hand, it’s part of our everybody world, very much the reality of our times. At the same time, it’s something incredibly other.

AB: What fascinates me about The Light at the End of the World is that it draws a lot on “weird” generic traditions, both the “old” weird of H. P. Lovecraft and the “new” weird” of China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, Victor LaValle and their ilk. Let me turn to Fisher’s distinction between the uncanny and the weird in The Weird and the Eerie again. Fisher says that Freud’s unheimlich is more about “the strange within the familiar,” the otherness within the self that is usually forgotten or repressed.

The weird, on the other hand, brings to the familiar something that “does not belong,” something “which ordinarily lies beyond it.” Can you talk more about your relationship to the multiple significations of the weird in your novel?

SD: I was familiar with some of Mark Fisher’s work on capitalism and popular culture before his unfortunate, untimely death, but I only read The Weird and the Eerie after your very perceptive review of my book in The Telegraph. So I wasn’t consciously drawing on concepts like the weird or the eerie. But as a writer, one is in conversation with ideas and influences often at the level of the subconscious.

I discovered some of these connections you mention, especially with Lovecraft, LaValle, and Miéville—and with the British writer David Peace, who excavates Thatcherism and the Cold War through the crime genre—as I was writing the novel. And it’s quite joyous as a writer to discover these connections. That’s the difference between nonfiction—where you know what you are going to find at the end of the story—and fiction: where you don’t know what you are going to find, because you’re really interested in the how of fascism or the how of capitalism or the how of colonialism, and you’re going at it without a thesis or a program.

Still, I was very clear that I wasn’t writing a realistic novella about Bhopal and the Union Carbide disaster in the “Claustropolis” section of the novel. I knew I was writing in two registers, one realist, historical materialist; the other the unusual, the weird, the strange, the spectral, the alien, and the evil, where the hauntology of Stalker and the Strugatsky brothers novel kicked in, writing about the Union Carbide site simultaneously as a place of capitalist extraction and as a Strugatskian-Tarkovskian “zone.”

Similarly, I knew I didn’t want to write an historical novella about the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion because that’s already been done well, in multiple Indian languages. I wanted to write a Western because I find the Western genre fascinating, with all of its racism, colonialism, masculinity, and violence. I wanted to write about a bunch of white men with guns riding up into the mountains. I was influenced by the concept of the Acid Western, which I was introduced to by a former student, the trans writer Alex DiFrancesco. You take all the genre tropes, but then you change it, you challenge the racist, sexist, violent politics. So, I wrote what in my mind I was calling an “Eastern,” a sitar and payal soundtrack playing in the background to this violent, weird quest where the dominant tropes of colonialism and the Western would end up being subverted.

AB: What about Lovecraft and your engagement with him? In your essay “The Shadow Over H. P. Lovecraft,” you talk about Lovecraft’s “tainted legacy.” But you also evaluate why his work holds interest in the current day, because of “the close proximity in it of racism and wonder, of hierarchy and marginality, an entangling that continues into our times.” Some direct Lovecraftian echoes are evident in your work, such as the tentacles that seem to appear in the fog in “City of Brume.” But I am interested in how you take some common Lovecraftian themes and turn them around, something also done in contemporary instances of the “postcolonial/decolonial weird” like in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, for instance.

SD: It took me a while to discover Lovecraft. His style of horror is so at odds with literary fiction—both with what gets taken seriously in the academy and by mainstream publications like the New Yorker with their preference for safe, middlebrow, midcult stuff—that it takes some effort to register his presence. Lovecraft was a racist, an oddball, and there’s this hilariously dismissive piece about him by Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker. But Lovecraft has outlasted Wilson, and at the same time, he has had to reinvented by writers like Victor LaValle, Jeff VanderMeer, N. K. Jemisin, and Rita Indiana, writers deeply aware of Lovecraft’s sexism and racism. I ended up writing an essay on Lovecraft for the New Republic during the pandemic-Trump times because it seemed like such a Lovecraftian moment: that juxtaposition of fascism and climate collapse and a global pandemic.

But the novel was finished by the time I wrote my Lovecraft essay. The essay systematized my thinking about Lovecraft, but in the novel, all that is buried, below the surface. I was deep into writing The Light at the End of the World before I realized that it was—especially in the Delhi sections featuring Bibi—in conversation with Lovecraft. I mean, the tentacles showed up by themselves.

But the tentacles, and also the wings and angels, are my ways of writing against Lovecraft. For him, what lies outside the weird is the source of horror. It’s the source of his racist, patriarchal fear of the other. But for me, especially in The Light at the End of the World, it’s exactly the opposite. What lies outside the weird—the subconscious, our dreams, our fantasies, the monster, the alien—these are actually possible sources of liberation.

It is fascism that is cruel. It is colonialism that is cruel. It is patriarchy that is cruel. All these are human made, modernized social structures. What lies outside—outside a world ruled by Modi or Netanyahu or Trump—could possibly be utopian.

AB: Lovecraft’s architectural obsessions focus on corners as a kind of portal to horrific outsides. In your depiction of national architectures—for instance, the Dolls Museum in Delhi—corners and dead-ends are portals to the “light at the end of the world” for Bibi, both in a literal (she travels to the Andamans) and metaphorical sense. Could you talk about your relation to Lovecraft, how you consciously deployed and inverted him, and also about your connections to the old and new weird trajectories?

SD: You’re right: The light at the end of the world comes from around the corner. We’re here in a fictional universe where light bends, where it doesn’t travel in a straight line, where it goes around the corners.

Why am I interested in that? Why am I attracted to corners? Why am I attracted to peripheries as possibilities of escape, as zones of liberation?

It has to begin—and you will understand this well at a personal level—with growing up in the northeast of India, on the corner of the nation, on the borders of the nation. On the edge, as it were. A place of tremendous violence that is off center, but that is also a place of possible escape, because majoritarianism and capitalism bleed out and lose force as they reach the periphery. The work of the anarchist anthropologist James Scott, who died recently, was an influence on me. The highlands—Zomia—are a zone of liberation from the oppressiveness of the state and conscription and taxation and hierarchies. It’s a place of not one minority but many minorities. Let a thousand minorities bloom, that’s my answer to the fascist unifying, monolithic vision.

There is also a lament and a yearning in the novel for the Third World, for what we today call the global South, as a similarly off-center utopian project, seen as peripheral to the Manichean battle of the west and its other. It’s a corner in history, an alternative, better path not taken, and it’s urgent for us as writers and thinkers to reclaim this, as the ongoing genocide in Palestine makes clear.

All this extends to my understanding of architecture, to the corner as a border in the micro-nation of an oppressive building. In The Light at the End of the World, there are corners and borders everywhere. People slip through doors and corners, they take unexpected turns in corridors. They try to find an escape from the neo-Speerian oppressive architecture of Modi’s Hindu-right Delhi, from the neo-liberal architecture of shopping malls and airports and from the British colonial architecture that came before, from the violence of class and caste and gender and ableism, from the repressed histories of violence and displacement.

In Lovecraft, the architecture that is oppressive is often alien, non-Euclidian, non-Enlightenment or not western classical. But in my work, we are the ones who have created these architectures of oppression, these architectures of violence: like the detention center being built in Assam, or the prisons in Pune or Delhi where dissidents and activists like those called the BK 16 are imprisoned under concocted charges.

AB: Even the Union Carbide building in The Light at the End of the World.

SD: Even the Union Carbide building. A factory. A prison. A panopticon.

AB: You talk about the “infinite geometry” of structures like the Union Carbide factory, you also depict the weird animacy of chemicals. But the weird space of the factory—a Zone following the trajectory of the Strugatsky brothers’s Roadside Picnic, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and Dyer’s Zona—also becomes the locus for a sublime encounter with the elephantine “thing” from another world. This encounter at the heart of the factory reminds me of China Miéville’s comment that the weird is “radicalized sublime backwash.”

SD: Absolutely, and Miéville’s lovely phrasing shows us both the connection with the Romantic notions of the sublime—itself a reaction to industrialism and colonialism—and our present moment where we discover polluted, contaminated loci for a somewhat different kind of sublime. As in the Union Carbide factory. As in military installations, black sites, interrogation cells, torture chambers, prisons, hospitals, asylums, laboratories, workers’ barracks, and brothels. These oppressive spaces seek to fix and finalize hierarchies of who belongs where; and within India, of course, we have to understand this within the context of caste as well.

In the novel, then, these spaces are taken up and one looks for the portals, doors, corners, angles, as a way of opening up avenues of escape. But the novel also wants to know what bleeds into these spaces from the outside in defiance of control and hierarchy and repression.

AB: In my review, I read your novel as an engagement with the Anthropocene. There is, of course, the direct allusion to the Anthropocene in the scene of the encounter with the leopard in the unnamed Northeast Indian city in “City of Brume.” There is also the brief allusion at the end to reversing time when “the water levels will fall, revealing not just mythical creatures but mythical continents like Gondwana … a world that is one of many possible worlds.” So clearly there is a multispecies, deep-time, and geological imaginary underpinning the novel.

What I also found fascinating was the novel’s engagement with air and breathing: the connection between toxicity and weird atmospheres in “City of Brume”; the representations of mediated visualizations of air like the AQI; the infrastructural aspects where tall, glass buildings place the elite in a bubble, while air and heat impact the subaltern populations of the city outside. One could say that “atmo-terrorism” has become mundane in the post-Anthropocene city. But there is also an organic connection between the air smelling like chilies and the representation of an atmospheric catastrophe in the Bhopal segment.

Could you tell us about how you engaged with the Anthropocene (given that you directly used that term in the novel)? What links the banalization of atmospheric pollution in Delhi, with the sudden irruption of a catastrophe that weaponized air as a deadly agent in Bhopal?

SD: It was somewhat frustrating to me that in India people often read The Light at the End of the World as a very narrowly political novel, about the current state of the nation. It is similar to the way a lot of the elites in India, including liberals, seem unable to really acknowledge the idea of the Anthropocene, which has to do with their anxieties and their attachment to capitalism and modernity and a certain model of so-called growth. So you’re absolutely right that this is a novel about the Anthropocene and that is true even when it ranges back to 19th-century section, because it’s all connected.

I am very struck by how alien the Anthropocene can seem. On the one hand, it’s part of our everybody world, very much the reality of our times. At the same time, it’s something incredibly other. Climate collapse is so hard to grapple with using just the tools of realism for that very reason.

How, for instance, does one make sense of something like the COVID-19 pandemic, something total in its control over our lives once and now utterly forgotten? Like once it stopped happening, it never existed. But for about a year all over the world we were stuck inside our spaces and we put on masks when we met one another—again, air—otherwise someone might die and people did die.

This is not science fiction, this was our reality. And now it has been erased from memory, which is also a kind of science fiction.

So I was very frustrated by the fact that nobody seemed to think that the air was something worth engaging with visually or textually or in terms of storytelling. And I wonder how much of that is because cultural production in India—and in the West, for that matter—is so elite that people aren’t affected in the same way by the air. I was also struck by the fact that in Bhopal, for instance, that is how people died: from breathing chemically spiked air, spewed out by a Western corporation involved in cost-cutting measures, because profits from the unit were not in keeping with projections.

I was trying to write a novel of the Anthropocene, because it’s impossible for me to have a novel of politics and authoritarianism and colonialism without it also being a novel of the Anthropocene. We don’t share air or water equally, not in New Delhi and not in New York. You look at the historical data in the US, where inner city children suffer much more from asthma because the air is worse, because sewage and power plants are located in minority and immigrant neighborhoods. I was also writing the novel within the context of Black Lives Matter, and it’s still hard for me to forget about the police chokehold on Eric Garner and his cry, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” That’s what they would have been saying in Bhopal as well.

Yet air also has a spectral quality to it. And that comes back to the whole tentacles and wings and angels. Air is also this premodern regime: It is often where we have looked for transcendence, the otherworldly, and the magical.

AB: Let me end on that note with my last question, which is on angels. You talked about tentacles as a reaching out, tentacles actually opening up different portals to history … and you also talked about air and flight as transcendence, salvation. Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis, which draws on Paul Klee’s iconic Angelus Novus, is one of the opening epigraphs of the text. And you end with an image of the cloud very much like the Benjaminian angel. Can you comment on the significance of this repetition?

SD: Thank you for being such a superb interlocutor. I don’t want to go to the ending of the novel too much, because you’ve already read it wonderfully. I discovered Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in a serendipitous fashion as a student at the University of Calcutta. I also had a certain interest in Milton and 17th-century literature. And I was fascinated by the idea in Milton that angels are androgynous, that they are intermediaries between God and humanity; and there’s of course the question of the fallen angel and rebellion. I haven’t read Milton in a while, but I go back to Benjamin again and again, especially in moments of doubt. And I wonder, is that the source of the angels beginning to creep into my fiction?

I don’t think this was conscious, but in part I probably embraced angels because I refused to see Islam, Christianity, or Judaism or the Marxist messianism of Benjamin as alien to my traditions. They are a part of my world, even if angels aren’t part of Indic Hindu and Buddhist traditions. But like the tentacles, angels began showing up in my fiction and I was perfectly happy with that.

In many non-realist modes of storytelling—premodern, of course, but also alternative modern traditions like the new weird and speculative fiction—angels are harbingers for the other world. They are a mode of communication between the divine and the human. And then for me, they represent a kind of excess and transcendence, something that the Hindu right would see as “foreign.”

And so—in opposition to the instrumentalization of air and the atmosphere, through pollution, capitalism, and the Anthropocene—angels and flight and the atmosphere represent, for me, the possibility of escape against the certainty of capture. And that is what the novel is obsessed with: on the one hand, the certainty of being trapped, of being fixed, of the end of the world; and, on the other, the possibility always of escape and flight and light. 

Featured image: Siddhartha Deb