A — the unnamed, unreliable narrator of Anisha Lalvani's debut novel 'Girls Who Stray' — drifts through Delhi NCR's neon-lit party circuits, upscale cafés, deserted roads, and dark alleyways, slipping through spaces that promise freedom but instead reveal the intricate, often invisible ways that urban India entraps women who dare to stray too far and too deep into its labyrinthine underbelly.
Part psychological portrait and part social commentary, 'Girls Who Stray' begins where A's dream of a life abroad ends. After an unexceptional education at an obscure British university, she returns to her family home in Noida with a kind of weightless malaise, bearing all the hallmarks of a generation raised amidst the collapsing scaffolding of globalist aspiration.
As she navigates the breakdown of her parents' marriage, a complicated extramarital affair with a real estate developer, and subsequently, a double murder, A's interiority — dispassionate and often desultory — becomes the novel's main terrain. In Lalvani’s hands, A's moral indifference becomes a form of critique, a way of registering the psychological cost of living in a society that makes illusory promises of self-determination while punishing every attempt to exercise it.
'Girls Who Stray' is not a traditional coming-of-age novel, and it is not quite a thriller either, although genre tropes like murder, betrayal, and sexual adventurism hover at its edges. It is actually a literary exploration of the many contradictions of contemporary urban India, where gated communities and abandoned construction sites coexist on the same street, and women move freely through public spaces with a mix of practiced defiance and learned vigilance.
Here, A's relationship with her sadistic lover is not simply a subplot; it is an indictment of the economic, familial, and gendered structures that frame desire and desirability as both currency and liability. Beneath the surface of this plot lies a meditation on visibility, power, and the fate of young women who fail — or refuse — to perform obedience, submission, and compliance.
Lalvani has a gift for observing urban India in all its sensory volatility: the brittle optimism of tech parks, the menace of unlit roads, the inescapable presence of surveillance — digital, familial, and social — in virtually all aspects of life. In 'Girls Who Stray', she articulates the psychological precarity of a generation caught between the promises of modern India and the ruins those promises leave behind.
Of course, 'Girls Who Stray' is not without its flaws. The prose is not always even in tone, the pacing falters at times, and Lalvani's refusal to provide catharsis may frustrate fans of neatly tied-up genre literature. But what Lalvani offers instead is something riskier and far more truthful: a brave, slippery, and culturally significant work that places the alienation and isolation that women feel in Indian cities, class desire, and urban dread at the centre of a fast-modernizing India. It's a politically charged portrait of disaffection that crackles beneath your fingertips as you turn the pages. On her debut, Lalvani joins a growing lineage of contemporary Indian women writers who write without apology or resolution.
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