Homelessness

Homelessness in the novel is not presented as a settled identity but as an abrupt condition produced by fear, property power, and the breakdown of domestic support during the COVID-19 pandemic. Niyati’s expulsion turns a home into a temporary privilege that can be revoked without warning, leaving her to protect her infant while navigating a city that offers no immediate refuge. Her movement toward Poonawala Mansion transforms homelessness from a private humiliation into a crisis of social belonging and makes visible the unequal burdens imposed on frontline workers.

Definition and Immediate Cause

Niyati’s homelessness begins when her landlord arrives at her door with two burly men and declares that he can no longer risk housing a pharmaceutical scientist or any other frontline worker. He frames the eviction as a responsible measure intended to protect the fifteen other flats in the building from infection. The language of collective safety gives the landlord’s private decision the appearance of public duty, but its practical result is that the person working against the pandemic is treated as the danger from which everyone else must be protected.

The order is immediate rather than procedural. Niyati is told that she must vacate the flat at once, while her belongings will be packed and sent to an address she names within the following week. She protests that the landlord cannot do this and reminds him that she has a baby, softening her tone into a plea. His response remains unrelenting: she has only an hour to take the essentials. The apartment therefore ceases to function as shelter before any alternative has been secured, and motherhood, instead of guaranteeing protection, intensifies the urgency of her removal.

The Eviction Scene

The eviction produces a physical and emotional shock. Niyati feels as though she has been punched in the gut when she understands what the men intend, yet she has no practical option except to comply. She gathers milk-powder containers and other necessities for Nilesh, places the belongings in her car, and straps the one-year-old into a baby seat with a milk bottle. These details define homelessness through the fragile material inventory of care: survival depends not on what can be saved from the home in general, but on what the child will need immediately.

Her husband, Lokesh Jha, is absent and unreachable throughout the crisis. Niyati repeatedly calls him, but the phone rings until the connection ends. She cries out for him and wonders where the man for whom she left her family has gone. The eviction consequently exposes two forms of abandonment at once: the landlord’s institutionalized exclusion and the marital absence that leaves her to manage displacement alone. Even the possibility of appealing to police or other authorities appears dangerous, since approaching them could increase exposure during the pandemic.

Once the essentials are in the car, Niyati collapses into the driver’s seat, uncertain where to go. She recognizes that choosing this flat instead of a larger gated society with stronger law enforcement has left her especially vulnerable, but the recognition cannot restore the security she has lost. She starts the car, struggles to steady the drive, and continues despite tears. The rain that begins as she moves through the city deepens the sense that homelessness is not merely the loss of an address; it is exposure to an environment in which every next decision must be made without protection.

Flight to Poonawala Mansion

After driving without a clear destination and failing to reach Lokesh Jha, Niyati identifies the only recourse available to her: Poonawala Mansion. She enters the address into the maps on her phone and hopes that her employer, Nargis Poonawala, will be willing to see her through the crisis. The journey feels interminable because arrival itself remains uncertain. Niyati knows that an employee cannot ordinarily appear at an employer’s home and demand a solution, yet homelessness has erased the ordinary boundaries between professional dependence and personal need.

Even at the mansion, refuge is not automatic. Security stops her at the gate because she is an unfamiliar woman seeking entry. Niyati sends a message explaining everything, abandoning linguistic restraint and political correctness because the emergency leaves no room for presentation or dignity as performance. She rests her head on the steering wheel until a security officer knocks on the window and opens the gate. The movement from street to garden path and then toward the central structure marks a provisional transition from exclusion to shelter, but it is made possible only by a desperate appeal and the discretion of those who receive it.

Nargis greets her as Dr. Niyati, and Niyati responds with embarrassment and an apology because she could think of nowhere else to go. The encounter restores a form of recognition that the landlord denied: she is seen not as a contamination risk but as a person, a professional, and a mother in distress. Poonawala Mansion thus becomes a possible refuge, although the evidence preserves the vulnerability of that refuge rather than presenting it as an automatic right.

Family Absence and Crisis Governance

The episode places Niyati’s displacement beside Lokesh Jha’s professional obligations. Before the eviction, Niyati worries about Lokesh’s safety because his work as a special officer with the Central Reserve Police Force may bring him into contact with death at any moment. At the same time, his absence leaves her without the partner whose help she urgently needs. The novel does not reduce this contradiction to a simple failure of affection: Lokesh is also summoned by the state precisely when his family requires him.

Lokesh receives a call from an assistant to the home secretary informing him that the ministry has received an anonymous tip about suspicious activity. The assignment is in Pune, and the call interrupts his attempt to take time away from missions and complete the paperwork from a previous operation. His first instinct is to resist involvement. He considers persuading the home secretary to let younger officers take the field role, or at least coordinating the operation remotely, because he wants time with Niyati and Nilesh and knows that he must repair his relationship with Niyati and prove himself to his son as a father.

The call nevertheless reveals how crisis governance redistributes risk. The landlord claims to protect residents by transferring pandemic danger onto Niyati; the state summons Lokesh into another security operation even as his household is unstable; and Niyati’s pharmaceutical work is treated as a reason for exclusion rather than as socially necessary labor. Across these linked pressures, institutions preserve their own procedures by making particular workers and families absorb the emergency’s cost.

Narrative Significance

Homelessness creates a sharp reversal in Niyati’s position. She is a trained pharmaceutical scientist whose work, in her own view, is part of the country’s effort to overcome the pandemic, yet the landlord uses that same work to justify expelling her. The contradiction is central: public service increases her social vulnerability when fear is organized through private property. Her assertion that her job will help the country defeat the pandemic confronts the landlord’s claim that her job threatens the safety of the building, but moral importance cannot immediately defeat material power.

The episode also gives homelessness a concrete scale through time limits, objects, and movement. Niyati has one hour to take essentials, a child who needs milk, a car without a destination, a phone that cannot reach Lokesh, and a map pointing toward a mansion where entry is still uncertain. Each practical detail narrows the distance between social stigma and bodily risk. The question is not simply where Niyati belongs, but whether she can keep Nilesh fed, secure, and with her while every familiar support fails.

In this sense, homelessness functions as both a social condition and a narrative test. It reveals the cruelty of treating frontline workers as disposable hazards, exposes the fragility of Niyati and Lokesh Jha’s family life, and opens the possibility of refuge through Nargis Poonawala’s response. The crisis does not erase Niyati’s agency: she argues, gathers what matters, drives through the rain, sends the message that may save her, and continues forward despite despair. Her homelessness is therefore imposed upon her, but the episode records the resourcefulness with which she refuses to remain immobilized by it.