‘The Wrong Way Home’: This novel with a single woman as protagonist gets what vulnerability is
· Scroll
The Wrong Way Home by Shunali Khullar Shroff explores the inner life of Nayantara (Nayan), a woman who looks successful from the outside but feels lost within. She is divorced and struggling to sustain her boutique PR agency in a world where perception matters more than reality. What hurts her most is seeing her ex-husband move on and marry a young influencer. Nayan keeps returning to social media and watching their captured-for-the-gram photographs, which only deepens her sense of stagnancy. She is unable to let go of the past and is unsure how to navigate the future.
Visit freshyourfeel.com for more information.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of “Liquid Modernity” runs throughout the novel. Liquid Modernity is a condition marked by fluid relationships, fragile commitments and identities that are constantly reshaped by circumstance. Nayan’s life reflects this liquidity with striking clarity. Her divorce itself is an outcome of modern affinal instability, where permanence has given way to provisional arrangements. Her failed romantic encounter with Arjun and later falling in love with Vikram are not framed as moral failings but as part of a restless search for emotional anchorage in a world that offers none. Love, in this novel, is not solid; it is tentative, negotiable and always at risk of dissolving. It...