What does it mean to choose someone — really choose them, and not just end up with them? Rahul Singh's debut novel Unfolding asks this question twice, in two very different registers, and only really answers it once.
Rahul's debut novel, Unfolding, announces itself, on the back cover at least, as a story about an affluent gay couple in Kolkata. Ralph wants steadiness. Ojas wants an open relationship. It's a premise we've been offered before, in one form or another — the ache of loving someone who wants something different out of the same relationship.
The second register is Zubina, Ralph's house-help, a working-class Muslim woman whose own marriage has given her two children and very little else. When she walks in on Ralph and Ojas sharing an unguarded moment, something in her own life cracks open. She starts to ask herself questions she has clearly been avoiding for years about what love was supposed to look like and whether the life she has is the one she'd have chosen.
This is where Unfolding earns its title.
Rahul writes Zubina's world with a care that never tips into spectacle — her home, her faith, her interiority, the small negotiations of her marriage. It would have been easy to let her track exist only to throw Ralph and Ojas's privilege into relief. Instead, Rahul gives her a full interior life, and the contrast between her world and theirs — one of glass apartments and open relationships, the other of cramped rooms and unspoken compromise — is stark without ever being crude.
What stands out, though, is how understated the actual contact between these two worlds is. Zubina is never handed a big scene where she has to reconcile her faith with what she sees in Ralph's home.
Zubina's presence in the house is proximate but never intrusive. She witnesses fragments of Ralph and Ojas's relationship the way any domestic worker witnesses the private life of their employer. What she does with it is more curious than doctrinal. The two households mostly run parallel rather than collide. It reads, if anything, like an easier coexistence than you'd expect.
The book moves between the two with a kind of quiet confidence, and it's genuinely touching to watch two people from such different circumstances arrive at the same restlessness from entirely different directions.
Where the novel loses me a little is the ending. And I say this as someone who understands exactly why it's written the way it is. Without giving too much away, the resolution reads less like two people actively choosing each other and more like two people settling because they are older now and tired, and a little afraid of what else there is. I know that's real. People do make decisions weighing age, fear, exhaustion, and the sheer cost of starting over.
But as a reader, I wanted more — I wanted the choosing to feel like a choice, not a concession. A part of me still hopes for the version where they pick each other in spite of everything, not because there's nothing else left to choose.
I also found myself wanting more from the open relationship at the centre of the book. Rahul is far more interested in the friction of non-monogamy than in its texture. We get the jealousy, the insecurity, and the unspoken rules being tested, but rarely the version of it that's working, the intricacy of how such relationships are actually built and sustained day to day.
That's a valid creative choice, and no author owes readers a rosier account of a life than the one they set out to write. But between the crisis and the collapse, there was room to show what an open relationship looks like when it's actually working — not just fracturing under its own conditions — and I found myself missing that quieter, harder-to-write version of it.
None of this takes away from what Rahul has managed in a debut: a novel that resists the urge to make its Muslim, working-class thread ornamental and that treats its queer characters' messiness as ordinary rather than symbolic. Both halves of Unfolding are, at their core, about people who have spent years not saying the thing that needed saying. And Rahul trusts his readers enough to sit with that discomfort instead of resolving it too neatly.