Gods for Each Other
Saraid de Silva on Bobuq Sayed
No God But Us is an overflowing suitcase of a novel. It crosses four countries to revisit the characters at different points in their lives and relationships with one another. Bobuq Sayed interrogates friendship, guilt, and accountability with a keen eye, remaining committed to the voices of their two narrators throughout. The book is precise, sincere, and features the most alarming and hottest meet-cute I’ve ever read.
The two perspectives we hear from are those of Delbar, an Afghan American whose reflections on gender churn beneath the other stories in this book, and Mansur, the queer Afghan man we first meet when he is still living in Tehran. Mansur is a little older than Delbar, a lot more forgiving, and he bears his responsibility to his family gravely. We’re first introduced to Delbar smoking weed in the bathroom before a family gathering he’s already hours late to. Delbar leaves the drag bar he hopes to one day debut in and arrives at his mother Qandul’s house to find that his absence hasn’t gone unnoticed. His mother, aunt and sister all admonish him before the aunties play their hand, announcing they’ve seen a photo of Delbar outside the nightclub he works at, next to some drag queens. Being outed in front of your whole family is a nightmare, and one that feels particularly cruel given that Delbar is already so raw—he’s high, of course, but this vulnerability is due to his tenuous family history and gruelling self-pity. And while this scene is upsetting, it’s also so funny, Delbar overcompensating with forced levity, pre-empting the worst even as it plays out. “To my family,” he narrates, “being in the vicinity of drag queens was synonymous with taking dick, and the only thing worse than being gay was being a bottom.”
Qandul is a political commentator with some international fame, a hellish profession for a mother in Delbar’s eyes. He cringes at every minor renovation to her house, “She wanted to emulate those glossy lifestyle magazines, shaving and soldering and sanding away every trace of character the house once had. Typical nouveau riche immigrant bullshit.” And is embarrassed by Qandul going to the lengths of flying in a famous singer to perform for her guests, the tension between who she is to Delbar and what she means to other people is wound so tight that everything she does, whether innocently or with malice, rankles him. When Qandul appears, “saunter[ing] in whacking a burgundy tablecloth across her open palm,” all the layered years between her and Delbar are cut open, pressing down upon one another like rock. They spend little time physically together in the novel, but every scene that includes them both causes Delbar a kind of agony.
While Sayed’s two narrators might have some things in common, the difference in how they consider and relate to their families could not be more vast. Following this terrible party, Delbar flees the United States for his aunt Yosra’s home in Istanbul, aware that running away from his problems is his go-to, but entertaining no other option.
When we first meet Mansur, he is living with his mother, sister, and the aunt to whom they are all indebted. He’s not happy with his life in Tehran, but he loves his family, especially his younger sister Elāha. Like Delbar, Mansur is also pressured to leave home quickly once he too is outed after making a play for the man with whom he is infatuated, launching his body out of a moving car to meet him. I read this glorious scene a few times over because it was that sexy. Just once in my life I want to look so good that a babe eats gravel to meet me. It is not only Mansur’s age and relative wisdom that makes him different to Delbar, it’s the way he holds his mother and sister in his mind, how quickly he forgives, makes allowances, tries to understand and support them as much as possible even after leaving, “All that was left of my heart took flight, and following suit, I did too.”
Our narrators start new lives in the same unfamiliar city, their eventual meeting separated still by some years. This lapsed yet parallel narrative is an innovative switch-up—here are two characters destined to find each other; living in the same city; slowly coming together. The arrival is so smooth you hardly notice how intricately it’s constructed. When it happens, it’s intoxicating. A little Shakespearean, for its inevitability, the weight it carries and the way it’s held off. It’s also one-sided; we gaze at Mansur through Delbar’s eyes. From this point of view we learn that he’s hot (duh) and the meeting is meaningful for them both, but pivotal for Delbar.
Sayed’s writing really blooms in these initial moments of desire, “From as early as I can remember,” they write, “I’d dreamed of meeting another Afghan like me, and now here he was at last, a fellow mutant or a lover from a former life.” Delbar’s loneliness and his relief at its dissipation is succinct but devastating. How unfair of him to place these feelings onto a stranger, how impossible not to. This moment and its repercussions are reminiscent of Noor Naga’s brilliant 2022 novel, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English. That book too, places its protagonist in a relationship which forces a confrontational mirroring. In a lot of ways, Naga’s character faces herself, but it’s the reader who sees the clearest, who winces first. I felt this same kind of gaze in No God But Us, as Sayed thoroughly examines the emotional complexities that keep these two characters apart, sharing chapters evenly between the two. It’s clear that Delbar and Mansur shouldn’t be together. Not just because Mansur is already in a committed relationship with his boyfriend Leif, but because he sees through Delbar’s reckless infatuation and takes his love at a slight remove, “My heart was warmed by the purity of his devotion, only the young love with both feet in the air.” Mansur lets lust lead him just as much as Delbar, but unlike his flight from a moving vehicle, he understands enough now to keep his feet on the ground.
Queer lives like the ones in No God But Us still feel relatively rare in contemporary fiction. By this, I mean queerness as something which is expansive, complicated, but intentionally regular. It’s not like this hasn’t existed in years before. Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues was published in 1993 and it’s full of queer people coming up against the state, fighting together for stability and protection. Feinberg’s novel explicitly addresses trans lives as a journey, even if it uses different vocabulary to what we might reach for today. There’s an agony to Jess Goldberg’s identity in Stone Butch Blues that Sayed’s trans characters don’t share. But both novels similarly approach queer friendship as the thing keeping our lives together, as worthy of maintenance and care as any romantic relationship. Sayed’s clarity here is so relaxing. The group is made up of Mansur, Delbar, Anahita, Poppy, and Leif, everyone bound together by both choice and circumstance, as understanding of the reasons for each other’s mistakes as they are hurt by them.
Mansur and Anahita were the beating heart of this book. Delbar was probably just a little too close to home for me—in his exasperation with family, his bumbling efforts to try his hand at a new art form, beefing with his circumstances even when they’re not so bad at all. We first meet Anahita in Istanbul, at one of the group’s dinners, and she bounces right up off the page, “Even at first glance,” Delbar narrates, “I noticed that everyone bowed to this speaker as a centrifugal force.” Quick-tongued and as brutal as she is caring, I was always looking for her, “Wet hair clung to her boa, and the sunlight made her gleam.” Anahita gets some of the biggest and most triumphant moments and, as a character, pairs so well with Delbar. There are parallels between this friendship and the romance of Delbar and Mansur—with Delbar being clumsy and standing in his own way. You get the sense that Delbar’s relationship with Anahita would be a lot deeper if only he could be bothered to invest a little more time in someone he’s not trying to have sex with. Pitched against Anahita’s blunt and honest care, Delbar’s failure to return the same was agonising. Anahita’s circumstances are already so restricted, I wanted nothing else bad to happen to her, I fell for this character so completely I was imagining ways for her to get free which I knew were impossible.
No God But Us astutely lingers in so many uncomfortable spaces, Delbar announcing that he and Mansur are boyfriends without Mansur’s permission was the most mortifying. His bravado-filled attempt to defy his mother, which is narrated by Mansur, “Qandul was not asking Delbar to deny himself, she was teaching him something, keeping him safe the only way she knew. He acted as if she was endangering him.” Sayed holds it off, delaying these moments where we see Delbar like this, slowly widening the gap between who Delbar wants to be and who he is currently: a person who can see the better way forward but who fails so often to take it. It’s clear that within the purview of this novel, there’s little chance of Delbar changing, but he’s on his way, we’re just meeting him at the start of the journey.
For all its beauty, there were times in No God But Us when the craft faltered, only just, the world-building distracting from the story, and the language, which was so often well-judged, feeling crowded. I sometimes wanted to see a character plainly without the scene around them decorated. In Anahita’s most heroic moment, for example, with officers batting away protestors “like fruit flies,” I craved less metaphor and more pace. Additionally, there were a few things Delbar explained to the reader which, although they were useful to a non-Afghan reader like me, nonetheless felt imposed, “Once an elder’s hand was kissed, the ritual of respect giving was complete.” It feels important to be an insider to a novel’s fictional world. These explanations the character wouldn’t normally offer inevitably break this assumed fluency. But these aren’t huge problems, especially not in a novel written with the kind of honesty that most writers seek and few find.
Although there are many romantic moments that make the book fun, it’s much more sophisticated and interesting a text for not being a traditional love story. This book is queer in so many satisfying ways, Sayed skillfully shifting the lens away from romance to interrogate who we can be to one another once we remove conventional expectations. These characters put their bodies on the line and are punished violently, they defy and disappoint their families, but still, it’s the moments when they let each other down that most define them.
The characters’ heroism felt as real and particular as any of their flaws, and it was a relief to read such complicated navigations and sacrifices within queerness, especially when unravelled alongside culture and identity. Nothing was easy and everything was worth it. Relationships with family weren’t judged as more or less important than self-determination. This book is full of clear-eyed commentary on the connections we forge within queer communities and the ways our histories can replay in our futures. Overwhelmingly it is the promise of forgiveness which binds its characters together and gives them something to strive for.
I finished Bobuq Sayed’s No God But Us a few days before my own international move. Another diasporic queer looking for love and excitement in a new city. I’m always surprised by the moments in novels that hang around. Here, it’s Delbar’s quick retorts to his awful roommate, Mansur’s patience when both Leif and Delbar are trying him, it’s Anahita leading Delbar through a market, helping him shop for a dress. It’s always character, for me, and closing a book about people portrayed with this kind of tenderness felt like really saying goodbye.
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WORKS CITED
✷ Noor Naga, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Graywolf Press, 2022.
✷ Bobuq Sayed, No God But Us, Ultimo Press, 2026.
✷ Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, Firebrand Books, 1993.
Saraid de Silva is a writer and arts worker from Aotearoa New Zealand, now based in London. Her debut novel, Amma, was published in Australia, New Zealand and the UK in 2024. Amma was longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for fiction, part of the New Zealand book awards, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2025.