Niyati's Pandemic Eviction

Niyati's Pandemic Eviction is the story's clearest instance of pandemic stigma becoming material violence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Niyati is expelled from her Pune home because she works as a pharmaceutical scientist and is therefore classified by her landlord as a danger to other residents. The eviction strips away the ordinary protections associated with housing at the precise moment when Niyati is most vulnerable: she is alone with her infant son, Nilesh, while her husband, Lokesh Jha, has been unreachable for three days because of his duties as a special officer with the Central Reserve Police Force. Her forced departure transforms a health crisis into homelessness, marital abandonment, and an urgent search for shelter.

Causes and Background

The eviction occurs two and a half years before the later narrative and is framed by the practical anxieties of pandemic life. Niyati has gone out to buy groceries, trying to purchase enough to avoid further exposure for the next couple of weeks. Shopping takes longer than usual, and she reflects on the trade-offs that brought her to Pune rather than Bengaluru or Hyderabad: Bengaluru appears to offer stronger online-delivery systems, while Hyderabad would have provided support services around Lokesh's designated Central Reserve Police Force quarters. Pune, however, offers the workplace she chose, making her employment both a source of professional purpose and the condition now used against her.

Lokesh's absence intensifies the danger. He has not contacted Niyati in three days, and his work exposes him to the possibility of death at any moment. Niyati still hopes that he will call safely, but the hope has no practical force when the landlord arrives before Lokesh does. The scene therefore places professional duty and family responsibility in direct opposition: Lokesh is serving in a security role elsewhere, while Niyati's own frontline scientific work makes her vulnerable to exclusion at home.

The Eviction

When the elevator doors open, Niyati finds the landlord waiting at her door with two burly men. He tells her that he cannot risk housing a pharmaceutical scientist or any other frontline worker because of the increased danger of exposure and contact. The landlord presents the expulsion as responsible protection for the building's fifteen other flats, converting collective safety into a justification for denying one tenant her home.

Niyati immediately understands that she is expected to vacate the flat that very moment. She protests that the landlord cannot do this and reminds him that she has a baby, but neither her legal or personal vulnerability changes his decision. He offers to pack and send her belongings to an address she specifies within a week, a promise that treats her life as a logistical problem rather than an emergency. He gives her only an hour to take the essentials, insisting that her job threatens the safety of everyone else in the building.

Her reply exposes the moral contradiction at the center of the confrontation. Niyati argues that her job is precisely what will help the country overcome the pandemic. The same labor that makes public survival possible is treated privately as contamination. Her scientific contribution earns no protection from the landlord; instead, it becomes the reason she is removed. The value at stake shifts from the apparent security of home to the immediate threat of displacement, while the language of public responsibility is used by the powerful against the person performing socially necessary work.

Flight with Nilesh

There is no time for Niyati to process the eviction. She gathers milk-powder containers and other necessities for Nilesh, loads what she can into her car, straps the one-year-old into a baby seat, and gives him a milk bottle. Her phone becomes an instrument of failed rescue: she repeatedly calls Lokesh, but the calls go unanswered. Her distress is directed toward the husband for whom she left her family, making the eviction reveal not only the landlord's rejection but also the fragility of the marriage's practical support system.

Niyati leaves without knowing where she will go. She regrets choosing this flat instead of a larger gated society where law enforcement might have been more effective, yet she also believes that approaching police or other authorities could increase the risk of exposure during the pandemic. The car, ordinarily a means of mobility, becomes the only available extension of her home. She drives in tears, forcing herself to move forward because stopping would leave her and Nilesh in an even more precarious position.

Rain begins as she drives around the city and continues trying Lokesh's number. She eventually pulls over without even knowing which road she is on. The change of direction comes through her phone's map: she types Poonawala Mansion and turns toward the residence of her employer, Nargis Poonawala. The destination is not presented as a guaranteed refuge. Niyati fears that she may be refused entry and recognizes that an employee cannot simply arrive at an employer's doorstep during such a crisis and demand a solution.

Refuge and Wider Consequences

Security initially stops Niyati at the gate because she is an unfamiliar woman. Unable to rely on formal institutions, she sends a message explaining everything, abandoning language and political correctness because the emergency leaves no room for self-presentation. After the security personnel receive the message, the gate opens. Niyati drives along the garden path toward the central structure, and the arrival of the lights and the call identifying her as Dr. Niyati mark the first interruption of her forced isolation.

The eviction's consequences extend beyond the immediate scene. It establishes Niyati's homelessness and leads toward her refuge at Poonawala Mansion, while also sharpening the tension between her professional identity and the social suspicion directed at frontline workers. Her displacement occurs because private housing authority is exercised under the cover of public health, showing how a crisis can make exclusion appear protective. The landlord claims to defend fifteen households, but the burden of that defense is assigned entirely to one woman and her child.

The event also reverberates through Lokesh's later choices. When an assistant to the home secretary tells him that an anonymous tip concerns suspicious activity in Pune, the location immediately matters to him. Though called toward another operation, he thinks about taking time away from missions, making amends with Niyati, and becoming recognizably present in Nilesh's life. The eviction thus becomes part of the marriage's unresolved crisis: Niyati needs practical protection when Lokesh is absent, and Lokesh later recognizes that duty to the state cannot erase his obligations as a husband and father.

Narrative Significance

Niyati's Pandemic Eviction condenses several forms of vulnerability into one sharply staged reversal. A routine grocery trip ends with an infant, shopping bags, a stroller, and a car becoming the fragile equipment of survival. The landlord's building is defended as a community, yet Niyati is excluded from that community precisely because she works for the larger public good. The episode therefore gives the pandemic a social face: not only illness and fear, but also stigma, hurried dispossession, institutional hesitation, and the conversion of private property into a gatekeeping mechanism.

The movement from the flat to Poonawala Mansion also gives the event a strong spatial logic. Niyati begins in a home that is legally hers to occupy but suddenly becomes inaccessible; she ends at a mansion that is not hers, uncertain whether she will be admitted, yet potentially capable of sheltering her. Her route is powered by contingency rather than security: an unanswered phone, a map application, a gate, and a message determine whether she and Nilesh will have somewhere to sleep. The eviction is consequently both a loss of place and the narrative threshold through which Niyati enters a new dependence on Nargis Poonawala and the mansion.