I’m balancing my little notebook on my knees and feeling a bit claustrophobic again in the Peppers Theatre, but I’m ready to hear from Anjali Joseph and Neel Mukherjee. From Mumbai and Calcutta respectively, the two new novelists have written something which neither of them refers to as Gay Indian Fiction.

Anjali’s novel Saraswati Park is about daydreams, apparently, but that’s a bit of an understatement. The story, she goes on to tell us, is about the private mental space we create for ourselves in crowded situations. In her novel about average lower-middle class people in Mumbai, life in an Indian family is crowded. Her characters, who commute in and out of the city centre, make rooms of their own in their imaginations – or by keeping seemingly mundane possessions in a locked box under the bed.

Neel reads from his novel A Life Apart. It’s an excerpt about his character Ritwik who lodges with an eccentric elderly woman in Brixton, and their strangely intimate relationship based on mutual need. His prose is populated with the internal monologue of the young man and the fractures words of the woman he lives with, and gives an unsettling picture of an existence rattling with uncertainty and frustration.

The passage Anjali reads is vivid with the noise of the station and the city. A tradesman and a woman in a bright green sari; both characters evidently leading double lives. Her prose is stunning, sensory and detailed.

Both writers have received bad (and weird) press at home; Anjali tells us that a reviewer from the Times of India, the paper she used to write for, memorably complained that the novel was too realistic. Another review spotted one morning by her mum claimed the sex in the novel was too tame, and the story read like it had been typed with a condom over the keyboard. Neel’s book was derided for having a font that made the reviewer feel they were reading a Ladybird book for adults.

Approaches to sex in modern day India are, both writers tell us, not particularly related to social class. Anjali makes the point that because the structure of family life is so central to society, the decision to live at some distance from the family is more scandalous than it is to have something other than a traditional heterosexual relationship. Therefore, people with non-traditional sexual orientations are often assimilated into the extended family.

It’s a satisfying event, with original and blunt ideas from the writers, and an honest picture of modern-day India which avoids mundane stereotypes.