Niyati

Niyati is a pharmaceutical scientist whose personal crisis becomes one of the clearest human consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a working mother caring for her infant son Nilesh while her husband Lokesh Jha serves away from home, she is treated not as a person performing necessary public work but as a danger to be removed. Her eviction, refuge, and marital rupture give the pandemic plot a domestic center: public duty sustains the country while private institutions abandon the woman carrying that duty.

Identity and Circumstances

Niyati is introduced as a professional whose work places her on the front line of the pandemic. She has chosen employment in Pune rather than a city with stronger delivery infrastructure or a location nearer to Lokesh’s designated Central Reserve Police Force quarters. That decision is presented not as simple carelessness but as a trade-off: her employer offers a workplace she values, while the practical support available in Bengaluru or Hyderabad might have made life easier during the crisis. She is therefore positioned between professional commitment and family logistics, with neither sphere fully accommodating the other.

At the beginning of her recalled crisis, Niyati is carrying heavy shopping bags while balancing a baby stroller in a lift. She has deliberately made each grocery trip count, knowing that exposure during the pandemic could force her to remain indoors for weeks. Her one-year-old son Nilesh is with her, and Lokesh has not contacted her for three days. Because Lokesh is a special officer with the Central Reserve Police Force, Niyati fears that his silence may signal danger, even while she tries to reassure herself that he will call safely.

Eviction and Forced Displacement

Niyati’s return home becomes an abrupt confrontation with her landlord, who is waiting at her door with two imposing men. He tells her that he can no longer risk housing a pharmaceutical scientist or any other frontline worker because of the possibility of exposure and contact. The policy turns her occupation into grounds for expulsion. Although the landlord presents the decision as a responsible effort to protect the fifteen other flats in the building, the immediate burden falls entirely on Niyati, who must leave with a baby and no present support from her absent husband.

The landlord gives Niyati only an hour to take essential belongings and promises that her possessions will be packed and sent to an address she names during the following week. Her protest that he cannot do this, followed by her plea that she has a baby, does not alter his decision. The scene makes the cruelty of the policy concrete: the supposed protection of a residential community is achieved by stripping a frontline worker of shelter at the exact moment when she is most vulnerable.

Niyati answers the landlord’s logic with the claim that her job is precisely what will help the country overcome the pandemic. Yet recognition of that social value does not give her any immediate legal or practical remedy. She gathers milk-powder containers and other baby supplies, tries repeatedly to reach Lokesh, and receives no answer. After placing the necessities in her car and securing Nilesh in his seat with a milk bottle, she is left on the driver’s seat without knowing where she can go. The rain that begins during her search intensifies the sense of displacement, but her response is not surrender: she turns on the car and continues moving.

Refuge at Poonawala Mansion

With no obvious destination, Niyati enters Poonawala Mansion into her phone’s map application. She hopes that her employer, Nargis Poonawala, will understand the emergency, while fearing that even an employer may refuse a distressed employee arriving unannounced during a public-health crisis. Security initially stops her at the gate. Niyati then sends Nargis a message explaining everything, abandoning the normal restraints of language and political correctness because the emergency has left her no room for formal self-presentation.

Nargis responds when Niyati reaches the mansion. Addressing her as Dr. Niyati, she tells her to come inside and promises that they will sort the situation out. She does not demand an elaborate explanation or make her justify the hardship. Instead, she instructs a house-help to settle Niyati and Nilesh in a guest quarter and undertakes to arrange temporary accommodation near the laboratory where Niyati works. The mansion thus becomes more than a wealthy household setting: it functions as an emergency shelter after the ordinary housing system has failed her.

The contrast between the landlord and Nargis defines the moral stakes of Niyati’s displacement. One uses collective safety to legitimize exclusion; the other treats safety as a reason to provide practical support. Niyati’s access to refuge depends on an employment relationship and on Nargis’s willingness to extend that relationship into care, revealing both the importance and the limits of informal protection during the pandemic.

Marriage, Estrangement, and the Final Message

Once she is safely settled, Niyati reassesses the life decisions that brought her to this point. Her anger is inseparable from abandonment: Lokesh has not been present when the landlord expels her, has not answered her calls, and is not beside her while she manages Nilesh and the family’s immediate survival. She sends him the blunt message, "We are over. Bye Lokesh." The message marks the eviction as the final breach in a marriage already strained by distance, competing obligations, and his prolonged absence.

The later narrative complicates the apparent finality of that decision. In Lokesh’s New Delhi flat, a nightmare places Niyati directly in danger: she appears during his pursuit of a terrorist operative and takes the bullet meant for him. He wakes believing for a moment that she may be present, only to find the apartment empty and remember that she is in Pune with their three-and-a-half-year-old son, estranged from him. The dream does not establish a real attack; it exposes the depth of his fear and guilt.

Lokesh calls Niyati despite expecting her anger. Her voice is initially cold, but it softens when she confirms that she and Nilesh are fine and asks whether he has seen the pictures she sent of their son making friends at daycare. Their brief exchange preserves a thread of parental communication beneath the marital frost. Lokesh thanks her for keeping him updated despite his absence, and after the call ends he quietly expresses love that she cannot hear. Niyati’s position in the relationship is therefore not reduced to either reconciliation or rejection: she has drawn a boundary after a lonely ordeal, while the later contact shows that shared responsibility and emotional attachment have not simply vanished.

Narrative Role and Significance

Niyati’s storyline joins structural violence to intimate fracture. The landlord’s refusal to house frontline workers embodies the stigma directed at essential professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Niyati’s pharmaceutical work counters that stigma with a direct claim to public value. Her professional identity grants her purpose but also makes her vulnerable; her motherhood gives the eviction its immediate stakes; and her marriage to Lokesh becomes the private relationship most damaged by the same crisis conditions that make her work necessary.

Her movement through the plot follows a stark sequence: she plans cautiously around pandemic exposure, is expelled without preparation, drives through the rain with Nilesh and basic supplies, reaches for help at Poonawala Mansion, and ends the night by severing her marriage through a message. The later nightmare and phone call reverse the emotional direction without erasing the injury. Niyati remains the person who was left to cope alone, while Lokesh becomes the person forced to confront what his absence cost. Together, these scenes make her a central figure in the book’s treatment of homelessness, single parenthood, marital estrangement, and the uneven distribution of safety during public crisis.