Delhi, India

In contemporary India, Delhi serves as the pressure chamber where both families translate love into rules, surveillance, and social strategy. Sonia’s family home becomes a place where reputations are monitored, marriage meetings are arranged, and private suffering is pushed into silence, which shapes Sonia’s sense that safety often depends on self-erasure. Babita’s Delhi household likewise turns the city into a stage for maternal control and class anxiety, as Sunny’s choices are judged according to what they signal to neighbors, relatives, and the past. Because so many conflicts originate in phone calls, visits, and decisions made here, Delhi anchors the novel’s themes of obligation, coercion, and the cost of belonging.

Allahabad, India

Set in the family bungalow and its surrounding neighborhood in Allahabad in the early twenty-first century, this setting functions as the story’s emotional origin point and the site of generational...