Girl, Untethered
Despite a lack of narrative focus, Anisha Lalvani’s Girls Who Stray (2025) is a welcome, urgent entry to contemporary Indian literature, a poetic voice echoing the angsts of a generation of Indians, and specifically, of Indian women who refuse to be assigned to their roles.
There is hardly a moment in Anisha Lalvani’s debut novel Girls Who Stray (Bloomsbury, 2025) when her protagonist—known simply as ‘A.’—isn’t being stirred. This is a physical stirring, as A. drifts alone on the streets of New Delhi on grimy nights, or follows rich and powerful men into hotel rooms, or takes buses and trains that charter across the breadth of India. This is also an emotional stirring, as A. is embroiled in stormy ruminations about herself and the world, about the grand economic inequalities of India, about the fraught relationship between women and urban spaces, about communal disharmony and aspiration and privilege and more.
These are all grand issues about a grand country, all encapsulated and funnelled through sharp, observant gaze of a mid-20s woman, who roots from a somewhat dysfunctional family. From its opening, the novel thrusts us into the realm of thriller and scandal: A. is tied up bed, “taut and naked” (3), a scene that this circular narrative will return to often. Lalvani wastes little time making majestic declarations about the false sheen of New Delhi and the NCR region, as her narrator records a visit to a new apartment complex: “Mermaids, nymphs and Greek sea gods in Italian marble look down imperiously at us. A faux nouveau Europe in the outskirts of Delhi, in perfect sync with the rest of this world.” (26) We are promised, early, that this could be a tale high in both intrigue and insight.
But, despite the intended bigness of Lalvani’s themes, Girls Who Stray hits hardest when the variety of themes coalesce into an intimate, uncomfortable knot. After a long-winded, hazy opening, the book finds its sharp focus when A. has one-night stand with a stranger who she meets at a pub in London, while she is in England for college. The morning after, this rich stranger—introduced only as ‘the bull-cartel man’—leaves her five hundred pounds. A. glows with joy; it’s not the afterglow of sex, but the thrill of the possessions that this money buys her: new silk scarves, perfumes, sweater, and shoes. She calls this man, “my first client in the escort business” (61).
Later, the man sends A. a text message, calling her a “glamour whore” and someone who is after “the chase” (62). For a young woman who had thus far been portrayed as someone lacking a clear aim or direction, this is a pivotal moment: she has been identified, or even defined, by someone else. She doesn’t dispute the bull-cartel man—even privately. Thus begins her unwitting Hero’s Journey, and as she drifts further into the life of this “escort business”, we wonder: what identification will she eventually claim for herself?
Girls Who Stray picks up momentum when Lalvani’s protagonist becomes an active participant in her own life, finding strength and self-esteem in the power she holds over men. At this juncture, sex is neither empowering nor demeaning or revelatory or cruel or enlightening; it is merely a blank that is skipped past. Her emotional spike doesn’t come from the sex itself, but from the attention she begins to receive from the “perverts” online whom she is able to sway and control.
The writing here becomes far more meaningful, too. Lalvani’s literary flourishes shine: it’s glitter not just for the sake of glittering, but for the purpose of the narrative. With a masterful blend of empathy and disgust, she writes:
And, looking at these multitudes, whole armies of men that wash up on the shore, a sadness overcomes me, a wastefulness. I feel sorry for them – hiding on their couches, beneath sheets, in bathrooms, so desperate for just a flashing breast, a glimpse of a passing thigh, clutching at the raw flesh of a stranger through their screens; feel sorrier for myself, my wretched self, crouching tight in the bathroom, a ghost in the bright light of the phone. (66-67)
Lalvani’s prose is at its best when she places her narrator in the witness stand, as an informed observer of the stark features and differences between her life in England and India, and within the social complexities of India itself. Girls Who Stray takes an elevator ride stopping on every floor of Delhi's social class levels, from the billionaires riding in their Porsches to the poorest in the slums writhing in dirt and mud. In one of the many such lyrical and detailed passages, she writes:
But behind the blingy facade I sense to my bone the outdated oldness of the city, the loose cement mixed with water, the makeshift corrugated iron sheets falling on top of filth beneath the metro pillars, tarpaulin tied in every corner, buildings in a perpetual state of repair lined with bamboo poles, cratered potholes everywhere, dried gutka splatter, backs of broken bus stops housing the blankets of neighbourhood beggars. Children with no hands, women with no hair and men with no eyes, with outstretched hands and nasal pleas at every traffic signal. Garish pinkand-red ‘Heppy Birthday’ posters wishing the ruling MLA’s son put up by the neighbourhood sycophant. (45)
It’s all in the same growing metropolis—the Delhi/NCR region—unavoidable only if one chooses to stop and see. Lalwani’s narrator often makes the choice to see, to observe, and reflect.
Lalvani’s heroine is immensely imperfect, unfocused, and an astonishingly bad decision-maker—and yet, she persists, for those decisions are her to make alone. Even when the men in her life intervene or encourage her behaviour, she eventually proceeds on her own accord.
Alas, too much of the prose in Girls Who Stray is spent in observation and reflection alone. With so much of the world to observe, so much injustice, so many crimes, so many inequalities, the novel often feels scattered and decentred. Lalvani pours immense effort into painting a picture of near-contemporary India around one young woman’s experience. The details are not insignificant, but in many cases, it feels like dressing or decoration, as if too much frosting has taken away the taste of the dessert itself. These are details of a rising NCR, a rising India, of young entrepreneurs, of aspirations and ambitions, and a guilt of how much of this changing world is leaving this young person behind.
The incidents pile up, from a paid affair with a rich real estate developer, to some grisly half-remembered crimes, to a city raging in protest after the 2012 ‘Nirbhaya’ incident, to a pregnancy mishap. There is so much life to be lived for a young woman, suddenly thrust into the crosshairs of power, sex, murder, and politics. And yet, A. herself seems to remain largely unchanged. Much of the prose becomes immediately forgettable, as we rarely see the accumulation of the protagonist’s experiences. Lalvani’s writerly flourishes often don’t work in service to the plot.
A more focused eye would’ve helped—for once the reader slips past the many overwritten tangents, what we find is brave and urgent tale that provides a new spin upon recent feminist narratives about India, questioning the lack of autonomy society provides our women. Lalvani does so by subverting our expectations of the independent, self-made woman—the type of perfect heroine that inspires unrealistic expectations of ‘girl power’. Girls Who Stray accomplishes a rare feat: the story of a young Indian woman being out, being free, making mistakes, fucking up, facing immense loss, dancing her ass off drunkenly to a Dua Lipa song (which was technically released many years after this book is supposed to take place), facing rock bottom in the grubby toilet of a metro station while period blood trickles down her leg, and getting fondled by men at public parks. It’s a life of turmoil and turbulence—but it is a life being lived.
Lalvani’s heroine is immensely imperfect, unfocused, and an astonishingly bad decision-maker—and yet, she persists, for those decisions are her to make alone. Even when the men in her life intervene or encourage her behaviour, she eventually proceeds on her own accord. When she is grabbed by a strange man near Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens while walking alone at night, she returns to the same street just a few days later, “because I must. Because it is mine too, to walk on,” (176) she decides.
And after more walks, more travels, more tangents, there is, eventually, a return. A return home, and a return to the narrative at heart, to the suspense that has loosely held the tale together. There is eventually a resolution, but Lalvani’s character remains emotionally distanced. There is a statis here, as if the heap of consequential experiences has somehow left her unchanged, as if she still carries the same numbness at the end as she did on the day before she met the bull-cartel man.
Girls Who Stray could’ve benefitted from a sharper edit. But, despite the book’s flaws, Lalvani’s work is a welcome, urgent entry to contemporary Indian literature, a poetic voice echoing the angsts of a generation of Indians, and specifically, of Indian women who refuse to be assigned to their roles.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. He is the author of Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis In India (2024) and A Beautiful Decay (2022), both published by the Aleph Book Company. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, Fifty Two, Scroll, The Caravan, the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph Book Company) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal). You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
