Rajat Singh is a queer Punjabi-American writer living in Brooklyn with his partner. His essays appear in numerous publications, and his work has been supported by the Spruceton Inn, the Tin House Summer Workshop, Lambda Literary, and Kundiman. His writing on personhood, the body, and the shades between loneliness and solitude draws from subjects as diverse as Latin, anthropology, fashion, and Hindustani classical Music.
Rajat’s novel-in-progress, Out of Time, is a portrait of an elderly Punjabi couple who welcomes their queer grandson Khayal to stay with them, following his failed suicide attempt. Following the arrival of dreams of his uncle, who ended his life a decade earlier, Khayal learns to attend to his family’s history of displacement, depression, and detachment, while grappling with his own mortality. Out of Time, written as a letter from nephew to deceased uncle, asks on whom our desires depend and who is responsible for failure. A meditation on the beauty and quiet joys of senescence, Rajat’s novel is an elegy to ruin, to pasts and places to which we can’t return.
As a 2022 Margins Fellow, Rajat looks forward to completing his novel manuscript, in addition to assembling a series of essays exploring AAWW’s archives to document New York’s history of queer Asian activism and artistic production. Throughout this year, he seeks a milieu in which to reimagine himself as a marginal figure and to build new kinds of community.
He Instagrams photos of his Welsh Terrier here: @rajatdayalsingh.