COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic functions in the novel not merely as historical background but as a pressure system that reorganizes nearly every sphere of life. It changes how companies measure resilience, how families endure bereavement and illness, how employers and landlords distribute risk, and how public officers balance duty against private obligations. Its first wave is especially consequential: it brings accidents, closures, displacement, separation, and renewed demands for institutional responsibility into the same social world.

Crisis and Corporate Resilience

The pandemic becomes a measure of corporate strength during the Goyal Group’s internal review. Girish Goyal emphasizes that Ascent Brandz contributes no more than five percent of the group’s revenue, while Shivam Goyal counters that Ascent was the only company in the group not to decline during the pandemic. Its employees avoided pay cuts, and its clientele continued to grow. The exchange establishes a contrast between the older real-estate and infrastructure business and the younger branding company: one is judged by scale and established revenue, the other by its ability to remain flexible and expand under exceptional conditions.

That resilience does not remove pressure. Girish demands that Ascent halve the time it takes to complete projects, and Shivam accepts reduced turnaround time as the company’s principal focus for the rest of the year. The pandemic therefore creates a paradoxical corporate environment. Survival and growth become evidence of competence, but success also produces an expectation of faster delivery. Crisis does not suspend competition; it sharpens it, transferring the demand for efficiency onto the company and its workers.

The company’s marketing strategy also develops within this altered economy. Aparna Mahadevan argues that a broad network of non-celebrity influencers can produce loyalty, reach, word of mouth, and lower costs per post, particularly for mid-range brands such as Kyrah maternity wear. Shivam later proposes a tiered reward system for the newly established influencer database, including a workshop for the top twenty-five influencers and further rewards for roughly the next fifty. The plan uses two Goyal family farmhouses at Mahabaleshwar and a refurbished garage to reduce expenses while building long-term loyalty. Girish’s warning that the company’s reputation is at stake when young mothers are taken on such a trip shows that pandemic-era business planning is also a question of safety, trust, and public accountability.

Grief, Accidents, and Family Strain

For Shivam Goyal, the first wave of the pandemic is inseparable from a sequence of personal catastrophes. A short circuit at one of the Goyal Group’s projects in Gurgaon leaves his mother, Menka Goyal, in a coma. Within six months, Mohini Bhattacharya also dies in a separate accident: after travelling to Pune to search for a cheaper office space for Ascent Brandz, she is killed by a gas leak in her serviced apartment. The pandemic does not directly cause either tragedy in the evidence, but its presence surrounds the losses and changes the circumstances in which the family tries to survive them.

Shivam explains that he and Girish respond to the combined shock by plunging into work. Business becomes their sanctuary, but their shared method of escape produces another form of damage. They compete over tasks, refuse emotional consolation, and begin picking fights and rejecting each other’s ideas without acknowledging the grief beneath their arguments. Menka’s coma and Mohini’s death thus transform a father-son relationship: mourning is not expressed as mourning, but displaced into managerial conflict.

The pandemic also interrupts the fragile recovery that had followed Sherlie D Costa’s removal to France and her gradual return to contact with Shivam and Mohini. When the pandemic strikes, offices in Vashi are closed as employees work from home. The closure forms part of the wider disruption that separates people, suspends ordinary business arrangements, and allows unresolved emotional histories to return with greater force. Later, when Sherlie D Costa again attempts suicide and lies sedated in hospital, Shivam’s response is shaped by the accumulated crisis surrounding the family, even as her obsessive attachment remains a distinct and destructive problem.

Housing, Stigma, and Exposure

The pandemic’s most direct social violence appears in Niyati’s eviction. During the crisis, Niyati returns from grocery shopping with heavy bags and her infant son, Nilesh, only to find her landlord waiting outside her flat with two men. The landlord says that he cannot risk housing a pharmaceutical scientist or any frontline worker because the work creates a higher possibility of exposure and contact. He gives her only an hour to collect essentials, claiming that her employment threatens the safety of the other fifteen flats in the building.

Niyati’s circumstances make the exclusion especially severe. Her husband, Lokesh Jha, has not contacted her for three days, and his work as a special officer with the Central Reserve Police Force means that she already lives with the possibility of sudden danger. She is forced to leave while caring for a one-year-old child, gathering milk powder and other necessities before placing Nilesh in the car. Her protest that her job is precisely what will help the country overcome the pandemic exposes the moral reversal at the center of the eviction: the labor society needs is treated as contamination by the people who benefit from the protection it provides.

Rain begins as Niyati drives without knowing where to go. After repeated unanswered calls to Lokesh, she enters Poonawala Mansion into her phone’s map application and appeals to her employer, Nargis Poonawala. Security initially stops her at the gate, but her desperate message leads to entry. The mansion consequently becomes a private refuge created by unequal access to resources, while the landlord’s policy shows how public fear can be converted into private coercion. The crisis is governed not only by hospitals and ministries but also by landlords, gates, cars, and the ability to claim shelter elsewhere.

Public Duty and Private Life

The pandemic extends into Lokesh Jha’s professional world through an anonymous tip about suspicious activity in Pune. An assistant to the home secretary orders him to report to headquarters, interrupting his attempt to finish paperwork and secure time away from field missions. Lokesh has already considered stepping back, believing that younger officers deserve the opportunity to work on the ground, yet his curiosity and sense of duty pull him toward the investigation.

The summons produces a conflict more complicated than simple obedience. Pune is also where Lokesh hopes to repair his relationship with Niyati and establish himself as a father to Nilesh. He considers refusing direct involvement, or at least coordinating the operation remotely, because he does not want another mission to consume the limited time available for his family. The pandemic therefore makes public service both necessary and costly: the officer is called toward a threat whose seriousness he cannot ignore, even as the same call threatens the domestic repair he has decided must begin.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, the COVID-19 pandemic repeatedly redistributes vulnerability. Ascent Brandz gains relative strength while its leaders confront demands for faster performance. The Goyal family’s grief is converted into work and argument. Niyati, despite being part of the essential scientific workforce, loses her home. Lokesh is drawn back toward an investigation when he is trying to return to his family. The recurring pattern is that institutions praise protection in the abstract while assigning its immediate cost to particular bodies: workers, mothers, patients, bereaved relatives, and officers.

The pandemic also links apparently separate plotlines without making them identical. Corporate expansion, family mourning, housing discrimination, and police investigation all occur under an atmosphere of restricted movement and heightened danger, but each reveals a different response to crisis. Some characters retreat into private property or work; others are expelled from shelter or summoned into public duty. In this structure, the pandemic is a state of exception that exposes existing inequalities rather than creating a single shared experience. Its lasting significance lies in showing how emergency intensifies old hierarchies while forcing unexpected forms of care, refuge, and responsibility into view.