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.
Rebranding the self
Shroff’s masterstroke is making Nayantara a PR professional. This is not a random career choice; it is the novel’s central metaphor. Nayantara’s trade is the manufacturing of perception, the buffing of tarnished reputations, the strategic leak and the curated feed. Yet, she is utterly incapable of managing the disastrous PR campaign of her own life. As she schemes to rebrand a Bollywood star whose ego is as sculpted and fragile as his abs, and a politician whose ethics are as flexible as his polling numbers, her own image lies in ruins, picked over by gossip blogs and the pitying glances of former friends.
Shroff says that this career choice emerged from her own experience and the organic demands of the story. “I did journalism for a few years and I did cross over to PR for a few years. And I said, you know, write what you know, right?… I wasn’t meaning for the career to be such an integral part of it, but it just happened by itself then.”
Our guide through this beautifully appointed purgatory is Nayantara, freshly divorced from her filmmaker husband Jay. (This is an AI generated image)
Satire of the Indian elite soirée
This choice perfectly facilitates Shroff’s peerless anthropological satire of the Indian elite soirée. She captures the specific clatter of ambition disguised as small talk, the silent, swift calculus of social standing as guests scan a room. Her satire is is exact, and therefore lethal. The influencer culture, the performative wellness, the profound emptiness camouflaged by #Blessed—all are dissected with a smile that never quite reaches the eyes. She understands that in this world, the greatest violence is a slight, and the most devastating weapon is a guest list.
This satire is rooted in a piercing social observation Shroff makes about the world her characters, and so many real women, inhabit: “I find that couples only plan their life with couples… The social structure is made only for pairs… And you introduce a single woman in the mix… it just throws everybody off.” Rather than romantic, Nayantara’s loneliness, therefore, is systemic, a form of social insolvency.
Mumbai to Landour
The novel oscillates between two poles: the frenetic, transactional heat of Mumbai and the austere, moral clarity of Landour, where Nayantara’s environmentalist mother resides. Kalpana, the mother, is the book’s quiet, formidable conscience. She is the tree to Nayantara’s hastily assembled, market-driven topiary. Their dynamic provides the novel’s emotional ballast and its sharpest critiques.
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In Landour, amidst real rhododendrons and real work, Nayantara’s Mumbai preoccupations—Who saw me? Whose wedding was grander?—are revealed in their full, dazzling triviality. It is here that Shroff’s prose, so witty and fleet in the city, slows and deepens, acquiring a lyrical gravity. Shroff’s personal connection to this landscape is profound. “I’m drawn to mountains, and I’m drawn to Indian mountains more than anything in the world… Every time I go to Landour… I find it extremely calming. It just does something for my spirit. I did it for myself. It was my refuge.”
From our conversation, Shroff reveals that this terrain is also personal in a thematic sense. She speaks of observing a “growing number” of women leaving marriages in their late thirties and forties, and of the social ecosystem that ostracises the single woman as a threat to the “equilibrium” of coupledom. “These are women I know… and they are not afraid to start all over. In their 40s, which is very brave.” Shroff was particularly driven to explore this space because, as a friend in publishing told her, “nobody in India has done a book about this segment and these women starting life all over.”
Shroff’s own authorial voice has evolved. If her previous work was effervescent satire, The Wrong Way Home is that same champagne left open overnight—slightly sharper, more acidic, with a complex aftertaste of melancholy and resolve. “I deal with bad news by infusing it with some sort of humour,” she says. This is the book’s alchemy. The one-liners zing, the observations crackle, but beneath them hums the real pain of dismantling a life. She acknowledges this evolution stems from lived experience: “I’ve gone through more life. I’ve gone through Covid, I’ve gone through growing children, separation anxiety, worrying about your kid in college, an older parent… So I think this is just a natural progression of my voice.”
The alimony question
The book is wise about the economics of divorce, both financial and emotional: the devastating “opportunity cost” of years spent playing a supporting role in someone else’s narrative.. In a nuanced take on the contentious issue of alimony, Shroff reflects on her character’s choice: “But if you see, my protagonist doesn’t even contest or ask for alimony… She feels that she’s given up her work willingly. He never asked of it. They have no children… And so she’s very decent because she’s well brought up. She’s not a gold digger… So I think it’s a case on case basis.”
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Yet, it pointedly avoids becoming a manifesto. “My book isn’t much about advice,” Shroff says. “I think I made Nayantara quite flawed… It’s easy to say that, you know, you shouldn’t care for social validation. But if I was ostracised by the society I lived in for any reason, I might yearn for them to have me back in their fold myself.” This nuanced understanding, that the desire for belonging is not a weakness but a human impulse, elevates the novel from simple skewering to profound empathy.
The Wrong Way Home is a rare thing: a genuinely smart novel about the performance of self in the age of social media, and a deeply moving one about the excavation of a self that might lie beneath. It refuses to offer its heroine a fairy-tale rescue, whether in the form of a richer man or a sudden windfall. Nayantara’s victory, when it comes, is small, professional, and entirely her own. And in the end, Shroff seems to argue that for a woman learning to stand alone in a world built for pairs, a genuine possibility is the most revolutionary happy ending of all.
Our guide through this beautifully appointed purgatory is Nayantara, freshly divorced from her filmmaker husband Jay. (This is an AI generated image)
