Point of View

The novel uses a shifting third-person point of view that moves between Sonia, Sunny, Babita, and other family members to show how intimacy is shaped by partial knowledge. Because the narration stays close to a character’s immediate perceptions, the reader experiences loneliness as a lived texture rather than an abstract theme: Sonia’s days in the United States feel airless and repetitive, while Sunny’s life in New York is marked by watchfulness and self-editing, and Babita’s Delhi and Goa sequences are crowded with suspicion and unspoken dread. This mobility of perspective also makes misunderstanding the book’s basic social fact. Characters believe they are acting out of love or prudence, yet the narration exposes the fears and fantasies beneath those actions, so care and coercion often appear in the same sentence of thought.

The point of view frequently relies on free indirect...