I would try to steer clear of all the cliches one uses when describing a debut author’s book, but Girls Who Stray by Anisha Lalvani has an assured voice that was refreshingly delightful as a reader. We follow a nameless girl navigating middle-class anxieties, a family in conflict, and the matter of her complicity in murder. No big deal.
Despite the back-and-forth switching of timelines and the element of mystery to the story, it’s a deeply personal book. It highlights the experience of being a woman in India—the constant gaze that’s upon you regardless of where you are, an increasingly isolated world devoid of connections, and the clutter that such complex circumstances eventually create. I sat down with Anisha for a virtual conversation (as befits a novel with ample commentary on today’s industrial tech-world) on Girls Who Stray, her process behind it, her relationship with Delhi, feminism, politics, and a bunch of other stuff. I hope you enjoy reading the conversation as much as I enjoyed hosting it. Edited excerpts below:
Amritesh Mukherjee: Delhi plays a major role in the book. It reflects a very intimate relationship with the city—the book is both a love and a hate letter. I’m curious about what your relationship with the city has been or was.
Anisha Lalvani: That’s a good way to describe it because Delhi is quite a difficult city, but I also find it very layered, complex, and beautiful. I’m from Bombay, but I moved to Delhi to work in publishing and at a bookstore since all the major publishers are there. It’s a literary city in that sense. I wanted to set a character who lives in the far suburbs, away from the center. I have family in Greater Noida, and there are many private apartment complexes there which are like picked-out chips—they have a swimming pool, a gym, a beauty parlor, everything inside—a very self-enclosed housing bubble.
Delhi felt perfect because of these large townships and because this character is very alienated; I wanted the environment to reflect that. The second reason is that there’s a lot of commentary on women, misogyny, and patriarchy, and Delhi became a natural setting for that.
AM: Your novel is many things: it’s a coming-of-age story, a feminist gaze at the Indian city and society, a commentary on apathy towards the less privileged, a murder thriller, a coming to terms with the personhood of your parents, and, as I mentioned earlier, a love–hate letter to Delhi. Did you have a structure or map in mind when you began writing, or did you start with a broad idea of what it would become?
AL: I took a very long time to write this—seven or eight years—and I was quite undisciplined about it. I didn’t sit down every day with clarity about what I was doing; in fact, for a long time I had no clue. I was driven by very intense feelings I’d carried for years, things I’d spoken about to people but never to the depth I wanted. One feeling was about living in a modern world where everything is moving fast—the economy, technology—but we haven’t come to terms with it. Without coming to terms with it, things keep accelerating, and that dissonance stayed with me. I wrote a scene of a girl sitting in a mall while all her friends post on social media and LinkedIn, and she doesn’t have a job; she’s in the suburbs of Delhi and feels out of place.
Later, I wrote a scene of her walking around Delhi after a breakup with an older man, while the Nirbhaya protests are happening. I lived in Delhi during the protests and went to witness them; in an upper-class urban context, patriarchy and misogyny were big questions then. I wanted to juxtapose those political questions with her personal feelings. These scenes were long and well written, but I didn’t know how to bring them together or even whether they should be brought together.
I enjoy crime and true crime, and the challenge of writing psychological fear and suspense was exciting. So I tried writing a crime story about a woman involved in a murder where, after the incident, nothing much happens. She’s simply waiting. I explored that waiting period, and through it the feelings of modernity and misogyny began to intertwine. Once I realized I could bring everything together through a loose crime structure, some clarity arrived. Then I built it slowly, and eventually it became what it is.
AM: It’s fascinating how the book captures not just the present moment but almost the last decade: conflicts around industrialization, inequality, AI, and the anxieties of the past few years. I’m interested in your thought process and the intentionality behind that.
AL: I wanted to capture what it feels like to live in the contemporary world and the anxieties that emerge from it, layering those with the anxieties the protagonist feels about her involvement in the crime. She witnesses it, she participates in a cover-up, but she doesn’t take action, and she carries enormous anxiety about that.
There’s also the feeling of not belonging, of not keeping pace with the economy or the world around her. Industrialization and post-industrialization frame her life: hyper-modern towers, vast complexes, a lack of community, an absence of people. I wanted to convey that atmosphere. AI is more recent, but I wanted the fears we have about AI to juxtapose with her real anxieties; I wanted to build anxiety upon anxiety, and I had fun doing that in a slightly mock way.
AM: I’m often wary of first-person fiction because it can slip into narcissistic rambling, but when done well, as in your book, it becomes intimate. The external world—patriarchy, power structures, the city—merges with her internal world. I loved the section on the Nirbhaya incident and the protests. Even today, when incidents happen, there’s often a tribalistic response: hang the perpetrators, as if they’re not part of the same society. We talk about rape, but not enough about rape culture. And you use Delhi’s claustrophobia so effectively. Can you talk about this: how people think of rape as separate from themselves, not something they’re part of?
AL: You hit the nail on the head. I wanted to go deeper than the usual automatic response. Again and again, there are rapes, and people say “hang the rapist,” but we don’t examine the underlying issues. There’s a rape culture and a culture of misogyny that produces it. Rape is the extreme symbol of a misogynistic, patriarchal society, but the roots run much deeper.
I wanted to explore nuanced aspects of misogyny, the complicated feelings men have towards women and vice versa. Rana Dasgupta’s Capital has a powerful section on gender in Delhi; it examines how wealth reshapes values and emotional lives. He interviews wealthy people, and it becomes a psychological portrait. That section resonated with me because it explored the psyche of men in Delhi, the origins of misogyny and its manifestations.
I didn’t want to analyze it academically; I wanted to explore the feelings: the claustrophobia, the lived experience of being a woman in a misogynistic culture. Her family isn’t misogynistic, but the broader environment is. The Nirbhaya protests made misogyny public on a large scale. Many incidents have followed, but that moment was a watershed. I also wanted to explore how cultural values embed themselves deeply, even if they don’t manifest as rape, they show up in comments like “don’t go out after dark,” which stem from the same attitudes: protect women, curtail women, instead of asking men to examine their own behavior.
AM: The title, Girls Who Stray, works in many ways: she strays from her conventional life, becomes an escort for a phase, strays around the city, strays morally because she’s entangled in something dubious, and struggles with her identity. What drew you to this motif? Did the motif inspire the plot, or the other way around?
AL: The title came much later, right at the end. I was confused about it for a long time, and my editor at Bloomsbury, Chirag, eventually said the book was going to print and we had to decide within an hour. We had many titles—some very Gen Z, which I didn’t understand. I thought of the phrase “all who wander are not lost,” and although it’s not directly connected to “stray,” it had a vague resonance. Then we thought of Girls Who Stray. When I first said it out loud, I didn’t realize its many implications. Once it was on the book, it felt right—the moral straying, the straying from societal expectations of womanhood, the literal straying across Delhi and India. I think the book led to the motif rather than the motif leading the book.
AM: Was keeping the protagonist nameless a deliberate choice to show it’s a universal experience?
AL: Yes. I wanted the character to feel universal and also to have some mystique. Not naming a character is in vogue—it’s a cool thing to do—but for me it was also about how many young people, especially women, share her feelings. That’s why I didn’t use names throughout.
AM: Do you think feminism’s portrayal on social media—as a cuss word—has shifted the window in India? Or has social media simply democratized regressiveness that always existed? Or is it romantic to think the past was better?
AL: I think change is happening for the good in some sense. Things have opened up far more than before. There are many types of feminisms today. Earlier we had a monolithic idea of what feminism was or should be. Now notions of feminism and freedom have changed drastically; they’re context-specific and far more complex. I don’t view this as a negative development. Even the space for a book like this suggests people are open to morally ambiguous women characters. Social media has enabled these conversations. Alongside this, there is a version of feminism shaped by liberal capitalism, but there are also more authentic strands and even rebellions against the capitalistic version, sometimes while operating within it.
AM: “The personal is political” carries throughout the book. Even when she’s apathetic in action, like the scene with Delhi protestors, that theme is constant. What’s your relationship with that sentiment, and does the book reflect your opinion?
AL: I studied literature—BA and MA—and “the personal is political” stayed with me. My understanding of politics has changed. Earlier it meant traditional politics: parties, votes, democracy. But studying literature made me see how personal politics can be: fraught, emotional, intense. I wanted to evoke that in the book. I’m glad you felt it deals with political subjects personally, because I didn’t think of it as overtly political.
The protest scene you mentioned, where she feels apathetic because she’s grieving, comes from a real feeling. In India you can’t escape the knowledge that someone is always having a worse day, but when you’re in your own mess, you’re incapable of showing up even if you want to. A couple of readers said that it touched them. It’s not overtly political, but it carries a deeply political lens that examines the person.
AM: Did you ever feel tempted to set the novel post-2014?
AL: It’s hard to write a novel today without addressing the last decade, but for this novel it wouldn’t have worked. There was already so much going on. I could have written commentary on everything. The book I’m writing now deals with religious bias more overtly, but for this one I didn’t want to. You have to be judicious; putting everything into a first novel won’t work.
AM: How much of your novel was research versus expression?
AL: The research was minimal because the thriller is based on the real Nithari case, which was so grisly I didn’t want to veer away from the facts. Towards the end, when I return to the case, that’s where the research appears. Even the parts about what poor people said are based on real life. The rest was my feelings and experiences, filtered through the narrative.
AM: Final question: What are you reading and watching right now, and what are you working on?
AL: I just finished Katie Kitamura’s Audition, which is shortlisted for the Booker. I like her prose; it’s thoughtful, measured. I’m reading Saharu’s Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, which won awards last year. As for watching, I love crime. I watched Monster: The Ed Gein Story—the story of the man who inspired Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre—a very weird story, but brilliantly acted.
The story I’m working on now explores similar themes. It’s about a woman who witnesses the murder of an imam in a masjid, based on a real case. It’s set post the riots in Haryana. It’s about someone who considers herself apolitical—when thrust into a political situation, how she responds—and she’s also dealing with issues in her marriage. That’s what I’m exploring.