Let us first dispense with the tired, shimmering adjectives that so often cling to novels about affluent Indian lives – “glitzy,” “sparkling,” “riotous.” Shunali Khullar Shroff’s The Wrong Way Home possesses a different, more valuable alloy. With the precise, unflinching hand of a social dermatologist, she biopsies the glittering surface of Mumbai’s haut monde. The result is a novel that is a relentless audit of social currency, fading looks, and the terrifying arithmetic of starting over when the ledger reads zero.
Our guide through this beautifully appointed purgatory is Nayantara, freshly divorced from her filmmaker husband Jay, who has promptly upgraded to a younger, Instagram-ready model. Nayantara is, in a word, magnificent. Not magnificent in her virtue—God, no—but in her spectacular, all-too-human failure to be the “graceful ex-wife” of self-help fantasy. She is vain, petty, deliciously catty, and spends an alarming amount of her professional energy stalking her replacement online. She is, in short, a bit of a mess. And thank fiction for that. In an era where fictional women are so often pressure-washed into inspirational figures, Nayantara’s unvarnished, often unlikable humanity is a tonic.
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