Conflict between professional mission and family responsibility

The conflict between professional duty and family responsibility is one of the novel’s central pressures. It places socially valuable work against the immediate claims of spouses, children, parents, and wounded relatives, asking what happens when serving a larger community leaves no strength or time for the people closest to the worker. The tension is not presented as a simple choice between virtue and selfishness: Niyati’s scientific work helps confront the COVID-19 pandemic, while Lokesh Jha’s Central Reserve Police Force service and investigations protect the public, yet both careers also produce separation, fear, and irreversible private damage.

Public Duty and Private Cost

Niyati’s dilemma is established during the pandemic, when she returns from grocery shopping with heavy bags, a stroller, and her infant son Nilesh. Her employment as a pharmaceutical scientist makes her a frontline worker, and she understands the danger of exposure well enough to limit shopping trips and stock up for several weeks. At the same time, her professional choice has already required compromise: she works in Pune rather than Bengaluru, where online delivery systems are described as more robust, or Hyderabad, where Lokesh’s designated Central Reserve Police Force quarters would have offered better support. Her career provides a workplace she values, but the practical cost is that mother and child remain in a city with fewer protective systems while Lokesh is elsewhere.

The pandemic turns that ordinary compromise into an immediate crisis. After Niyati reaches her flat, the landlord arrives with two men and orders her to leave because housing a pharmaceutical scientist, or any frontline worker, presents what he calls an unacceptable exposure risk. The eviction is carried out while she has a one-year-old child, while Lokesh has been absent for three days, and while she has no realistic time to appeal. Her work is treated as a threat to the other tenants even though it is also the reason the country may overcome the pandemic. The scene exposes a social contradiction: the community depends on frontline labor while attempting to exclude the laborers who perform it.

Niyati’s response is therefore both professional and maternal. She gathers milk powder and other essentials, secures Nilesh in the car, and leaves without knowing where she can go. She considers the danger of approaching police or other authorities during the pandemic, then turns to Poonawala Mansion, hoping that her employer, Nargis Poonawala, will recognize her emergency. The journey is not framed as a triumphant professional sacrifice; it is a forced displacement in which a worker’s public usefulness does not protect her from private vulnerability.

Niyati, Lokesh, and the Broken Household

Lokesh’s absence is not explained as indifference alone. As a special officer with the Central Reserve Police Force, he may encounter death at any moment, and Niyati privately prays that his silence means only that he is safe. Yet the narrative places the danger of his work beside the concrete consequences of his absence: Niyati must negotiate eviction, transport, childcare, and shelter alone. Her professional identity makes her vulnerable to public suspicion, while Lokesh’s professional identity keeps him physically and emotionally unavailable when the family most needs him.

At Poonawala Mansion, Nargis responds with practical care rather than interrogation. She arranges a guest room for Niyati and Nilesh and promises temporary accommodation near the laboratory. Once settled, however, Niyati reassesses the marriage rather than merely the housing emergency. She sends Lokesh a message declaring that they are over, identifying the night as the final consequence of an ordeal in which he had not stood beside her. The decision shows that the professional-family conflict is not abstract: it reaches a point where survival requires Niyati to redraw the boundary of the household.

Lokesh later experiences that separation through a nightmare in which Niyati appears behind him during a dangerous situation and shields him from a bullet. He wakes in his empty New Delhi flat, drenched in sweat, and remembers that Niyati is in Pune with their three-and-a-half-year-old son, estranged from him. The dream makes his fear visible, but it does not erase the history that produced the estrangement. His immediate call is an attempt to confirm that Niyati and Nilesh are safe; her distant, cold voice reassures him only in the narrowest sense, and the call ends before he can complete his farewell.

His guilt is anchored in domestic objects and unfinished obligations. A coffee machine given by Niyati becomes a reminder of the collapse of his personal life, while family photographs now carry the shadow of the final divorce hearing. Lokesh admits to himself that he should have been present when Niyati and Nilesh needed him most and resolves to do whatever he can to hold the family together and heal the wounds of her loneliness. The language of resolve is immediately tested: before he can begin repairing the marriage, another assignment interrupts him.

The Returning Mission

The prior Bollywood investigation has already consumed Lokesh’s private life. He and two associates have indicted the culprits behind the drug mafia and uncovered a child-trafficking racket, but the victory brings him no satisfaction. The desk work of collecting, filing, and corroborating evidence, along with pressure from celebrity suspects and their allies inside the system, has taken his energy as thoroughly as the field operation. He understands the mission as the work that cost him his family life, not simply as a successful act of public service.

When an assistant to the home secretary reports an anonymous tip about suspicious activity in Pune, Lokesh initially resists. He has already requested time away from such missions and believes younger, capable officers deserve the chance to work on the ground. The mention of Pune changes the emotional stakes because it brings the assignment close to Niyati and Nilesh. He intends to tell the home secretary that he cannot allow another mission to consume the time he needs with his family, perhaps offering to coordinate remotely instead.

The choice remains unresolved when professional curiosity overcomes his resistance. He looks at the bulky file from the completed investigation, knows that its final paperwork still needs to be filed, and then accepts the order to report to headquarters. The call produces a physical jolt because Pune represents both the possibility of family repair and the summons of duty. He leaves the flat angry at the situation, aware that officers also have lives, yet still carrying his keys toward the next obligation. The contradiction is the point: even after recognizing the cost, he remains shaped by the vocation that caused it.

Family Crisis Beyond the Police Plot

The same tension appears within the Goyal family, where business responsibility and emotional obligation occupy the same rooms. During a meeting, Girish Goyal tries to concentrate on investment companies after Alex D Costa makes an ill-timed remark about couples bound together by business. The remark recalls Menka Goyal, Girish’s wife, whose coma resulted from a short circuit in one of the family’s new projects at Gurgaon. Menka’s condition, together with Mohini Bhattacharya’s death, has damaged the relationship between Girish and Shivam Goyal over several years. Girish forces the meeting forward by opening the investment folder, using corporate procedure to contain a private grief that cannot actually be removed from the room.

Rati Goyal similarly explains how family history shapes present responsibility. She identifies the long friendship between Savio and Shivam’s grandfather, contrasts Savio’s ethics with Alex’s conduct, and credits Girish with preventing Alex from crossing certain lines. Her conversation with Shivam also acknowledges that grief over Mohini, his first love, cannot simply be overcome. The family therefore treats emotional wounds as obligations that must be lived with, even while business and reputation demand continued functioning.

The cost of family custom appears during Shivam’s birthday. Because of a custom concerning deceased family members, his parents do not hold a party for him. Alex intervenes, restrains Sherlie D Costa, and offers to celebrate at his own home, insisting that Shivam’s parents love him. Shivam cuts the cake reluctantly, more to pacify Sherlie than to celebrate. Years later, he recognizes that the episode should have revealed the unhealthy nature of Sherlie’s obsession with him; the family’s attempt to manage the moment and preserve emotional peace instead allowed a deeper crisis to continue.

The consequences of that failure become explicit after Aparna Mahadevan’s evidence leads to police involvement. Satyam Goyal praises her for preventing a possible press scandal but also affirms that reporting the crime was the correct decision because Alex had murdered Mohini and the family had continued doing business with him. He tells Shivam that Sherlie is not mentally sound and will now receive help. In this context, family loyalty cannot mean concealment: protecting the group’s reputation conflicts with the ethical duty to expose violence and secure intervention.

Narrative Significance

The novel treats professional commitment as morally meaningful but refuses to let that meaning cancel domestic responsibility. Niyati’s work contributes to the national fight against the pandemic, yet social fear drives her from her home. Lokesh’s investigation dismantles criminal networks and rescues the public from further harm, yet the mission leaves him facing divorce, guilt, and a child growing up apart from him. Their parallel situations distinguish the value of the work from the adequacy of the worker’s presence at home.

The conflict also exposes how responsibility travels through families. Girish uses an investment meeting to suppress grief; Shivam’s relatives preserve birthday and mourning customs while missing signs of psychological danger; Satyam ultimately insists that familial and corporate interests must yield to truth and justice. Across these episodes, duty is never singular. A person may owe something to a country, a company, a spouse, a child, or a damaged family member at the same time, and fulfilling one obligation can intensify failure in another.

The most important contrast lies between recognition and action. Niyati acts decisively when the landlord removes her, finding shelter for herself and Nilesh and ending a marriage that has become untenable. Lokesh recognizes his failure and wants to repair it, but the next call from the ministry pulls him back toward the same professional machinery. His unfinished departure leaves the conflict open rather than neatly resolved: family responsibility has become his declared priority, while professional duty remains powerful enough to command his body before his promise can be tested.