Girls Who Stray: Anisha Lalvani’s Debut Novel Redefines Indian Women’s Fiction with a Dark, Coming-of-Age Thriller

The protagonist moves through Delhi’s neon-lit party scenes, upscale coffee houses, deserted streets, and shadowy corners.
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Anisha Lalvani’s debut novel marks a bold new direction in Indian women’s writing. This coming-of-age thriller follows a nameless 23-year-old woman who dreams of moving abroad to salvage her floundering career and escape the wreckage of her parents’ failing marriage.

She does go but soon returns when she runs out of money. Once she comes back, she finds herself haunted by unresolved traumas, an uncertain future, and a mind consumed by spiralling anxieties. A one-night stand with a powerful business tycoon upends her world, dragging her into a whirlwind of desire, danger, and desperation, which she both craves and fears.

What sets this novel apart is its unapologetic amorality, raw candour, and the protagonist’s brutal self-awareness—qualities rarely found in contemporary Indian women’s fiction. Lalvani writes with a restless urgency and a disarming randomness, mirroring the chaotic impulses we often conceal behind morality, rationality, and our carefully curated public selves. The book settles into the reader’s mind like an itch—irritating, unsettling, infuriating—whose jagged edges have to be scratched to find relief.

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The brutal honesty with which Delhi-NCR emerges as a character in the novel is commendable. Lalvani paints the city not just as a backdrop but as an active, breathing force—one that shapes, consumes, and mirrors the protagonist’s own turmoil. With razor-sharp clarity, she lays bare the fraught relationship between women and urban spaces, where mobility is both an assertion of agency and a constant negotiation with danger.

The protagonist moves through the city’s neon-lit party scenes, its upscale coffee houses, deserted streets, and shadowy corners, experiencing first hand the illusion of freedom that Delhi grants women while simultaneously trapping them in its labyrinths.

Girls Who Stray refuses to offer easy resolutions or neat moral lessons.
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Lalvani also captures the stark and violent divide between wealth and deprivation that defines the city. The Delhi of high-rise apartments, gated communities, and super-rich socialites coexists uneasily with the Delhi of invisible factory workers, domestic labourers, security guards, and street vendors, all struggling to survive on the margins. The protagonist, grappling with her own losses, finds herself caught up in the turbulence of these two conflicting forces: the seductive pull of privilege and the crushing weight of inequality.

She is both repelled by and drawn to the opulence of the city, unable to reject it completely yet deeply aware of the moral decay that lies beneath its glamorous surface. In her aimless wanderings, reckless indulgences, and quiet observations, Delhi becomes an omnipresent entity that defines and devours her.

To loiter, to reclaim

The novel reminded me of Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade’s 2011 book, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. The authors’ core argument is that loitering is an act of reclaiming public space and, as such, offers a more inclusive form of citizenship for women. This desire can be felt in the protagonist’s aimless wandering, her strategic stalking, the nights of partying and drinking, the endless hours spent in coffee houses to delay returning home, and her midnight rebellions: spray-painting over corporate advertisements in an act of defiance. Every movement is both an escape and a declaration, a way of navigating a city that refuses to make space for her.

One of the novel’s persistent themes is the loneliness and alienation that shroud the city and the protagonist. Growing up in a dysfunctional family leaves her desperate for love and a sense of belonging—she looks for them in questionable places and through dangerous means. Although repulsed by the rot behind the city’s glittering facade, the protagonist is unable to resist crossing over to the “wrong side”. It leaves her with an aching grief for all that she loses in the process: dignity, peace, the child that died within her before she could abort it, and a love that was never truly hers.

Documentation of emotions

The ending leaves the reader stunned, grappling with the emotional wreckage of the journey they have just undertaken. Girls Who Stray refuses to offer easy resolutions or neat moral lessons. Instead, it lingers in the mind like an aftertaste: bitter, intoxicating, and unsettlingly familiar. The story is both fresh and hauntingly recognisable, especially to women who have walked the tightrope of desire, danger, and defiance in a world that polices their every move.

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What makes Girls Who Stray truly powerful is its documentation of emotions we often do not confess even to ourselves: the longing to be rash, the seductive pull of self-destruction, the quiet violence of loneliness, and the desperate need to belong, even at great personal cost. Lalvani masterfully captures the contradictions of contemporary womanhood, where agency and vulnerability, power and peril, freedom and fear exist in constant tension. The novel holds up a mirror to the messy, unspoken realities of modern life. Girls Who Stray is a daring, necessary addition to the corpus of Indian women’s writing.

Anjali Chauhan is a research scholar in the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi.