Published Aug 26, 2026 | 7:00 AM ⚊ Updated Aug 26, 2026 | 7:00 AM
Anisha Lalvani
Synopsis: Girls Who Stray is less like a thriller than a prolonged encounter with a consciousness that cannot settle. It explores the peculiar loneliness produced when freedom expands faster than the ability to understand what it is for.
Cities do not always reveal themselves through their monuments. Sometimes they reveal themselves through the spaces in between: an unfinished road, a dark stretch beneath a flyover, a gated apartment complex still smelling of cement, a luxury car passing a sleeping labourer. The contemporary Indian city is full of such interruptions. Its promises are everywhere, but so are the ruins of those promises.
Anisha Lalvani’s Girls Who Stray enters this city through Noida and Greater Noida, though its geography keeps expanding into Delhi, Mumbai and London. It is a novel about a young woman who cannot quite find a place for herself, but it is also about a place that seems increasingly incapable of accommodating anyone except those who already belong to it.
At twenty-three, A, the novel’s unnamed protagonist, returns from an obscure British university with an expensive degree that offers little in the way of a future. She returns not to a home waiting for her, but to a home already coming apart. Her parents’ marriage has fractured. Her mother leaves for Bombay. Her father remains behind with an ailing, increasingly senile father. The family has not exactly broken. It has dispersed into separate rooms, separate cities and separate silences.
This is where Lalvani’s novel becomes interesting. A is not conventionally deprived. She has education, mobility and a family that has managed to send her abroad. She belongs, at least materially, to a privileged section of contemporary India. Yet privilege does not give her a sense of belonging. It produces another kind of anxiety, the anxiety of someone who has been promised a future but cannot recognise herself in it.
She has studied abroad, accumulated debt and returned to an India being remade by startups, real estate, private capital and the vocabulary of perpetual growth. Around her are new apartments, expanding roads, investment schemes and the restless confidence of people who believe that the future can be purchased. A, however, seems unable to purchase a place within it.
Her response is to drift.
Drifting is perhaps the novel’s most important action.
A does not move towards a clearly defined destination. She moves away from one discomfort into another. To deal with her financial situation, she enters the world of escorting. She begins selling sex with a degree of practical detachment that is both disturbing and revealing. Sex, money, desire and power begin to occupy the same moral space.
Then comes the property developer.
He is wealthy, married and accustomed to getting what he wants. The affair between him and A is not presented as a conventional romance disguised as transgression. It is closer to an exchange in which both desire and power keep changing hands. A is attracted to his wealth, his confidence and his ability to inhabit the world without appearing to question it. He, in turn, sees in her a mixture of availability, intelligence and vulnerability.
The relationship becomes increasingly violent. What begins as sexual experimentation turns into something darker, and A’s fascination with the man becomes inseparable from her awareness of his cruelty. This is one of the uncomfortable achievements of Lalvani’s novel.
She does not make desire morally tidy. A can understand that a man is dangerous and still desire him. She can despise his wealth and hunger for it. She can recognise violence and remain within its orbit.
Eventually, the affair takes her into crime.
A becomes an accomplice to a double murder and helps dispose of the body of Muniya, a young girl. The episode recalls the Nithari killings, not as a simple fictional retelling but as part of the larger memory of violence that has accumulated around the expanding National Capital Region. The city in Girls Who Stray is a place where development and disappearance can exist disturbingly close to one another.
After this, the novel could easily have become a conventional crime story. It does not.
Instead, Lalvani remains interested in what happens inside A.
That decision is both the novel’s strength and its difficulty.
The narration moves through time, memory and association. A’s mind is rarely still. One thought produces another, then another, until the external world begins to look like an extension of her internal restlessness. The murder is important, but the novel is less interested in solving it than in examining the strange psychological territory surrounding it.
This is why Girls Who Stray often feels less like a thriller than a prolonged encounter with a consciousness that cannot settle.
A is difficult to like. Lalvani seems to know this and, importantly, does not try to rescue her. There is no easy moral rehabilitation, no convenient moment in which A suddenly understands everything and becomes a better person. Even the abortion that follows her unwanted pregnancy is narrated without the emotional architecture one might expect from conventional fiction.
Events happen. A registers them. She moves on.
This emotional flatness can be read in two ways.
It can be understood as a daring representation of alienation, a condition in which even extraordinary events fail to produce the expected emotional response. But it can also leave the reader wondering whether the novel has sufficiently explained the forces that make A behave as she does. This is close to the difficulty identified by Scroll, which argues that the novel’s many thematic directions sometimes leave its protagonist’s motivations insufficiently grounded.
The question is particularly important because the title Girls Who Stray carries a political burden. To call a woman a girl who has strayed is to suggest that there was once a correct path from which she departed. It is the language of parents, institutions and patriarchy. A woman who drinks, travels, desires, has sex, chooses badly or simply refuses to remain where she is expected to remain is often described as having crossed a line.
Lalvani is clearly interested in this language of judgement. But the novel’s most provocative question is whether A’s straying actually constitutes freedom.
At times it does. At other times it looks like another form of captivity.
This ambiguity gives the novel its force. A is neither a simple victim nor an uncomplicated rebel. She possesses agency, but that agency is constantly compromised by loneliness, money, sexual power and the need to be desired. She makes choices, but the choices available to her have already been shaped by family, class and gender.
This is where the novel’s urban landscape becomes more than scenery.
Noida and Greater Noida are not merely locations in which the story happens. They form a psychological geography. Their broad roads and unfinished spaces, their apartments and construction sites, their sudden pockets of wealth and equally sudden evidence of deprivation, mirror A’s own divided consciousness. The city is modernising faster than its inhabitants can understand what modernity has done to them.
Lalvani is particularly good at observing this physical world. Her city has the peculiar brightness of contemporary India, where aspiration is almost always accompanied by anxiety. There are people who have acquired wealth without acquiring security, and people who have acquired education without acquiring a future. There are buildings that rise faster than relationships can be repaired.
In this sense, Girls Who Stray belongs to a growing body of Indian fiction concerned with the emotional consequences of liberalisation. Its real subject is not merely crime, sex or a troubled young woman. It is the peculiar loneliness produced when freedom expands faster than the ability to understand what freedom is for.
The novel also asks uncomfortable questions about female agency. A refuses to be a morally exemplary woman. She is selfish, perceptive, contradictory and sometimes cruel. Yet the refusal to make her exemplary does not automatically make her liberated. This is where the novel remains productively unresolved.
The comparisons with Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character and Ratika Kapur’s The Private Life of Mrs Sharma are understandable. Like those novels, Lalvani’s work is interested in women who exist uneasily within the moral arrangements imposed upon them. But Girls Who Stray is more fractured in its form and more insistently interior. Its real drama takes place not between good and evil, but between knowledge and action. A often knows what she is doing. That knowledge does not stop her.
And perhaps that is the novel’s darkest insight.
We like to imagine that awareness protects us from our worst decisions. Lalvani does not grant us that comfort.
Still, the novel is not entirely successful in holding together everything it wants to contain. Its thematic reach sometimes exceeds its narrative control. The thriller machinery can feel imposed upon a story that is otherwise more interested in drift, memory and consciousness. The non-linear structure occasionally creates not productive uncertainty but simple disorientation. Some passages could have benefited from sharper editing. Scroll has made a similar criticism of the novel’s thematic excess, while Outlook also noted that the thriller elements can sometimes feel forced even as the coming-of-age narrative lingers.
But perhaps a debut should also be judged by the risks it takes.
Lalvani takes several.
She gives us a protagonist who cannot easily be defended. She allows desire to remain compromised. She refuses to make violence automatically transformative. She places a young woman in the middle of a rapidly changing urban India and lets her consciousness wander through its contradictions without providing the reader with a reassuring map.
That wandering is the heart of Girls Who Stray.
A strays through cities, relationships, money, sex and memory. But the deeper she moves into these spaces, the less certain the meaning of escape becomes. Perhaps one can leave a family without leaving its wounds. Perhaps one can leave a country without leaving its hierarchies. Perhaps one can acquire the freedom to choose and still remain imprisoned by the conditions from which those choices emerge.
The city keeps building itself around A. Roads widen. Towers rise. Money changes hands. People disappear. Life continues.
A keeps moving.
And in that movement, Lalvani finds something more disturbing than a thriller’s suspense: the possibility that sometimes the most dangerous place is not the city one has entered, but the self one has carried into it.
Book: Girls Who Stray
Author: Anisha Lalvani
Publisher: Bloomsbury India
Price: ₹699
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(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bangalore-based management professional, literary critic and curator. He writes on literature, art and culture, society, environment, and contemporary life for leading publications across South Asia.)
