There are some books that tell a story, and there are others that leave behind an atmosphere. “The Other Side of the Rainbow”, the debut novel by Niranjan Nayak, belongs, in many ways, to the latter category. It is a book about friendship, youth, loss, guilt, love and the strange persistence of memory but beneath all of that lies something more unsettling, an attempt to understand how the past continues to inhabit us long after we believe we have escaped it.
Set against the backdrop of Ravenshaw College in the late 1980s, the book enters a world that will feel immediately familiar to readers who grew up in an India before smartphones, social media and the relentless acceleration of contemporary life. Hostel corridors, classrooms, friendships forged in adolescence, ambitions that seem enormous at twenty and the peculiar intimacy of campus life form the emotional architecture of the story. Yet the author does not use nostalgia merely as decoration. He gradually turns it into an instrument of remembrance, and, eventually, of pain.
At the centre are Arun and Rajeev, two young men whose backgrounds, temperaments and approaches to life place them on markedly different trajectories. One carries the weight of a past he is attempting to outrun; the other conceals secrets that threaten to alter the meaning of everything around him. Their friendship develops through the ordinary rhythms of youth, conversation, ambition, frustration, humour, affection and dreams before fate begins dismantling the apparent stability of their relationship.
And that shift is crucial.
The book is initially resembles as a campus book, but it refuses to remain comfortably within that genre. What begins with the recognisable warmth of youthful companionship gradually acquires the emotional temperature of a tragedy. The rainbow, consequently, becomes less a symbol of uncomplicated hope than a threshold, there is always another side to beauty, and sometimes what lies there is grief.
One of the book’s most compelling achievements is its recreation of a vanished campus culture. The author understands that nostalgia works best when it is rooted in ordinary details rather than grand declarations. The rain leaking through a roof, children making paper boats in puddles, hostel life, the texture of rural hardship, youthful infatuations and friendships that feel almost permanent these seemingly modest details give the novel its emotional credibility.
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The late-1980s setting is particularly significant because the characters inhabit a slower social world. Their relationships develop through physical proximity and sustained interaction. There is no digital escape from discomfort, no instantaneous communication to dissolve misunderstandings, no online identity separate from one’s physical self. A hostel corridor can therefore become an entire emotional universe.
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For readers who grew up during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, this aspect of the book may carry an especially powerful resonance. But the book’s nostalgia is not exclusively generational. Younger readers can also recognise something universal in it as the first experience of discovering that friendship can become family, that love can be both exhilarating and painful, and that adulthood often begins when our idealised understanding of people collapses.
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The book’s sense of place is therefore more than geographical. Ravenshaw College becomes a psychological landscape. It represents a period before life acquires the burden of irreversible choices and that is precisely why the later tragedy hurts.
The relationship between Arun and Rajeev forms the book’s emotional centre, and the author’s strongest decision is not to make their friendship excessively neat. They are not simply two friends who understand each other perfectly. Their relationship contains differences, discomfort, concealed histories and emotional contradictions. One is shaped by escape; the other by concealment. Their bond therefore carries an implicit question: how much of ourselves can we hide from someone who believes they know us? This becomes particularly effective because friendship in the book is treated as something more complicated than companionship. It becomes a form of self-discovery.
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We often understand ourselves through the people with whom we share our formative years. Friends become mirrors, sometimes flattering ones and sometimes brutally accurate ones. Arun and Rajeev’s relationship gradually exposes precisely this function of friendship. Each becomes entangled in the other’s emotional world, and the consequences of that entanglement extend far beyond the carefree years of college. There is also something admirable about the author’s refusal to reduce his characters to heroes and villains. Their emotional lives are messier than that. Their decisions emerge from fear, longing, circumstance, guilt and human weakness that ambiguity gives the book much of its power.
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The most successful aspect of the book is its emotional sincerity. The book does not feel written merely to manufacture twists or extract tears from the reader. Its sadness emerges from its investment in people and memory. Even when the narrative becomes melodramatic, there is an underlying sincerity that prevents the emotional material from feeling entirely artificial. The book also understands an important truth about nostalgia, remembering youth is not necessarily remembering happiness. Sometimes we remember the people we were before we understood what life would cost us.
✍️ Strengths :
🔸A vivid recreation of late-1980s campus life and the lost atmosphere of hostel culture.
🔸A deeply emotional exploration of friendship, grief, guilt, love and memory.
🔸Arun and Rajeev provide a compelling emotional axis built on contrast rather than sameness.
🔸Strong nostalgic appeal without reducing nostalgia entirely to sentimentality.
🔸Simple, accessible prose that allows the emotional narrative to remain foregrounded.
🔸Effective use of rain, the rainbow, childhood and memory as recurring emotional motifs.
🔸An unpredictable narrative that refuses to settle comfortably into one genre.
🔸A sincere engagement with the psychological consequences of loss.
🔸Strong emotional framing through the poems surrounding the narrative.
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✒️ Areas for Improvement :
▪️Some emotional transitions deserved greater psychological depth.
▪️A few sections are slightly unclear or structurally uneven.
▪️Certain passages explain emotions that could have been allowed to emerge naturally through action and dialogue.
▪️The narrative occasionally becomes emotionally overstated.
▪️A tighter editorial hand could have made the prose more restrained and the major emotional moments more devastating.
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In conclusion, the book is about the dangerous persistence of the past. Its characters may leave their childhoods behind. They may enter college, build friendships, fall in love, make plans and imagine futures that seem entirely their own. But the past does not always release us simply because we have moved away from it. Sometimes it waits, sometimes it returns through a person, sometimes through a memory and sometimes through a tragedy that permanently changes the meaning of everything that came before.
The author’s debut does not achieve perfection, and it does not need to. What makes it worthwhile is the fact that it reaches for something emotionally difficult, the intersection between youthful innocence and the knowledge that innocence cannot survive forever.
The most affecting parts of the book are therefore not necessarily its dramatic revelations. They are the quieter images, the rain entering through a damaged roof, paper boats drifting across puddles, hostel corridors filled with young people who believe they have time, friendships that feel indestructible precisely because their fragility has not yet been understood that is where the book finds its deepest truth.
