Untying Knots, Reframing Divorce

In a culture that exalts marriage and denounces divorce, The Wrong Way Home is a refreshing addition to our romcom shelves. But here’s the thing: you might read it and reshelf it. Biting and hilarious, it’s more than a romance. Tripping through its pages with its feisty and endearingly vulnerable heroine, Nayantara, offers a window into India’s perennially-angsty upper crust. Whose positions on status pecking orders can be promptly toppled by the slightest slipup, amplified these days by social media’s hall of mirrors.

When Exes Trade Down

Forty-year-old Nayan, as the founder of a PR firm, is a central player in the snakes and ladders of perception management. Except that she has to, aggravatingly enough, manage her own optics amidst posts about her ex-husband, Jay, getting hitched to a hot, 20-something. The new find, a blue-ticked influencer who collaborates with luxury brands in beachwear, skincare and other vexing categories, provokes for another reason. Jay, as a pretentiously cerebral, indie filmmaker used to imply that Nayan wasn’t his “intellectual match.” How then could he promptly succumb to the emphatically shallow?

Needing A Pause from Posts

Perhaps she can condone his shiftiness if she too has a plethora of male partners flocking around her. But clearly second chances seem tilted in favor of divorced men, leading Nayan to the trenchant conclusion that in her world, “middle-aged men seem to want to marry only teenagers.” While simmering with grief and fury, she also has to bat pitying glances from her team and the vulturous rapture of friends. It doesn’t help that Jay’s a celebrity whose rise she had deftly fueled. In circles where the private is public, she hankers for seclusion to nurse her resentment. And an escape from her own online stalking, a compulsion that incites a chef client into throwing a “Michelen-star tantrum.”

Retreating to Ma and the Mountains

The only person she can stand meeting is her gay friend, Rishi, who steers her focus towards the domain that still counts: her work. Moreover, it grates that press reports of Jay’s doings have diminished her career to a dismissible “Nayantara who works in PR…” Since vengeance can fan motivation as little else, she returns to office with renewed fervor. And agrees to pitch to a fading star in Bollywood, a sector she had skirted earlier.

Anjali, her bestie from college, flaunts her still-romantic relationship with her husband in what feels like flagrant one-upmanship. Nayan ruminates that their tie had always been that way. Marked by affection no doubt, but also by an undertow of rivalry and comparison. In the thick of all this, Khullar Shroff’s humor shines through. When Nayan bumps into JAY’s friends’ wives, “they wave at me with smiles so pitying, you’d think I was Rahul Gandhi.”

Eventually, she retreats to her widowed Ma, who lives in Landour. The handloom-clad Kalpana Swarup, is an outspoken environmentalist who takes on governments and institutions. During Nayan’s childhood however, she had spent more time with farmers and other subalterns, largely absconding from her maternal role. Never quite approving of Jay, Ma had been rather relieved by their divorce. Such mockery however, spills into her view of Nayan’s career.

An Idealist Suitor Appears

Still, at this point, fierce Ma, who’s unshaken by life or public opinion, feels like the sanctuary that Nayan needs. At the airport bookshop, when she spots Ma on the cover of The Week, she glows with pride. If only she had a shard of Ma’s tigress temperament.

At this stage, Ma seems to kindle her motherly instincts. And attempts to set Nayan up with the jeering, pietistic Vikram – a Stanford-educated single father – who like Ma, works for the dispossessed. While zealously setting up a network of village schools, he echoes Ma’s disapproval of Nayan’s soul-crushing path. Both Ma and Vikram, in their preachy takedowns, seem indifferent to Nayan’s take on her life. That she might actually like her work and living in the city. As she puts it, “How many sunrises and sunsets can you delight in after all?”

Tossups Between Money and Morals

Deploying the device of a love triangle, Shunali has her protagonist see-sawing between the idealist Vikram – who grows on Nayan with each encounter – and the irresistible, ultra-moneyed Arjun. Should she pick a humdrum constancy over thrilling highs and sapping lows? Should she heed the much-married Sagari’s advice, whose husband has “the personality of a garden umbrella”, that love always dims but money lasts? Should one evoke envy in others but wallow in private misery? In a world where images wash over one’s interior state, will she lose sight of who she is and what she wants?

All along, we watch Nayan inflating the reputations of a medley of Mumbai’s types: Sagari, a social media influencer, whose small-town sensibility has been remade with a big city’s panache; a politician with a dubious past, whose performative charity feels better than none at all; an actress who aligns herself with LGBTQ+ protests to hike her social media standing. Compromises – of the ethical and legal kind – are inevitably baked into her PR firm’s rise. But then again, does anyone, with any form of privilege, who currently inhabits our interconnected planet, not be complicit in some manner or the other? Can anyone claim a permanent seat at the holier-than-thou table?

Finding Levity in Uneasy Times

The work provokes many questions, obliterating boundaries between the trivial and the profound. Reading this felt like being curled up with a bestie, who shares a similar, snarky take of the world. In these times, when we might feel besieged by various crises, humor is an elixir. Rather than ruminate on bleak futures with sullen numbness, it would do well to lighten our worries with chai and chuckles. Wrong way or right, we all need to get back to where it all started: home, however variously we might define it.

References:

Shunali Khullar Shroff, The Wrong Way Home, Bloomsbury India, 2025.