Pune

Pune occupies a distinctive place in the narrative as a city of competing demands. It is associated with corporate expansion and due diligence, with the sudden death that deepens Shivam Goyal’s grief, and with the pandemic-era pressures that drive Niyati toward Poonawala Mansion. By the end of the supplied chronology, Pune is also the site of a new suspicious-activity investigation that threatens to pull Lokesh Jha away from the family life he is trying to repair.

A Business and Work Destination

Pune first appears as a destination shaped by professional duty. Shivam explains to Aparna Mahadevan that his absence has been caused by a trip there to conduct due diligence on property that Satyam Goyal intends to acquire. The city therefore enters their relationship through the language of work: it is one of the unexpected places to which Shivam may be sent, part of the demanding schedule he says includes night-long calls and days without seeing loved ones. Aparna’s fear that his absence might signal second thoughts about their relationship gives the trip an emotional consequence beyond its business purpose. Pune becomes evidence of the tension between intimacy and the obligations of the Goyal family’s commercial world.

Pune also serves the expansion of Ascent Brandz during the COVID-19 pandemic. As leased office spaces in Vashi are closed because employees begin working from home, Mohini travels to Pune to search for a cheaper office space for the company. Her movement to the city is practical and economically motivated, but the narrative places it immediately before an unforeseeable disaster, turning an ordinary corporate errand into the last stage of her life.

The City of Mohini’s Death

Pune is the setting of the accident that destroys Shivam’s first love. While staying in a serviced apartment there, Mohini dies in a gas leak in the middle of the night. The account reaches Aparna through Shivam’s recollection, and its abruptness remains central: there is no dramatic confrontation or deliberate act in the description, only a freak accident arising from an ordinary attempt to keep Ascent Brandz viable. The city’s business function and its fatal consequence are thus inseparable.

Mohini’s death changes Pune from a place of work into a location marked by bereavement. Shivam says that he plunged into work after her death in an effort to distract himself from grief. The chronology of the account also measures Sherlie D Costa’s return against the loss: she comes back about six months after Mohini dies and pushes Shivam toward normalcy, later joining the company and using contacts from her work in France to bring celebrities to endorse clients. Pune is not described as a place of mourning rituals, but its association with Mohini’s final journey becomes part of the emotional history Shivam carries into his relationship with Aparna.

Pandemic Pressure and Niyati’s Crisis

In the prologue’s earlier chronology, Pune is where Niyati’s professional and family burdens converge during the COVID-19 pandemic. She works there while Lokesh serves as a special officer with the Central Reserve Police Force, and she contrasts her situation with the stronger delivery systems she imagines in Bangalore and the support available through designated CRPF quarters in Hyderabad. Her decision to work in Pune has involved trade-offs: the city offers the workplace she chose, but it also leaves her dealing with pandemic restrictions and domestic strain without the same practical support.

A grocery trip becomes unusually difficult because Niyati wants to limit exposure for the next several weeks. She returns carrying heavy shopping bags while balancing a baby stroller, and she worries that Lokesh has not messaged for three days. His work exposes him to danger, yet the immediate hardship is also logistical and emotional: she must manage an infant, supplies, uncertainty, and the absence of communication. Pune consequently functions as a lived environment rather than a backdrop, intensifying the pressure placed on a mother whose partner is repeatedly drawn away by duty.

Poonawala Mansion as Refuge

When Lokesh remains unreachable, Niyati drives through the rain without caring which road she is on. Her only recourse is to enter Poonawala Mansion, the home of her employer, Nargis Poonawala. She types the destination into her phone’s map, uncertain whether Nargis will help or whether the security staff will refuse her entry. The journey from Pune toward the mansion is therefore an act of desperation: the city is the point from which she seeks shelter, while the mansion represents a possible refuge whose acceptance is not guaranteed.

The threshold initially confirms her fear. Security stops her at the gate because she appears to be a stranger, forcing Niyati to send a message explaining everything before she is admitted. Once the gate opens, she drives along a garden path toward the central structure, where the lights come on and she is greeted as Doctor Niyati. Pune’s significance in this sequence lies in the pressure it produces and in the movement it compels: isolation in the city gives way, however precariously, to an appeal for protection within another household.

A Recurring Site of Obligation

Pune returns at the end of the supplied material as the destination of an official operation. Lokesh is finishing the paperwork for a previous mission when he receives an anonymous tip about suspicious activity. The ministry orders him to report immediately to headquarters because the new assignment is in Pune. The call revives the familiar conflict between public responsibility and private repair: Lokesh has already sought time away from such missions, wants younger officers to have a chance on the ground, and knows he must make amends with Niyati and become more present for their son.

His first impulse is to resist personal involvement and possibly coordinate the operation remotely, but his professional curiosity and sense of duty remain powerful. After the call, he slams his fist on the counter, grabs his keys, and leaves. Pune therefore closes the available chronology as it began for other characters: as a city that summons people away from ordinary intimacy. Across its appearances, it joins commercial necessity, accidental death, pandemic vulnerability, refuge-seeking, and law-enforcement duty, making geographical movement a visible form of the novel’s larger conflict between work and the fragile obligations of family life.