‘Girls Who Stray’: Anisha Lalvani’s debut novel about a young woman’s missteps lands on unsure feet

Girls Who Stray, by Anisha Lalvani, is a confusing novel. The title may well be an ironic nod to male misogyny, which advocates the idea that women should be kept in fetters lest they stray and disgrace themselves. The novel makes this point explicitly:

What these deranged rapists [of Nirbhaya] were saying was surely not all that unfamiliar. It’s what, after all, the nation has been saying to its daughters all these years – we must protect our women against the temptations of the West, inching closer all the time. Punish those who succumb, who yield to these modern ways – dancing and bars and movie date nights, parents who allow their girls to roam around half naked at night. Horrific, yes, what happened to the girl, but which half-decent girl roams around the city at night like this?

And yet, with the protagonist not being given a name, the denial of an identity seems to convey that she is not an individual in her own right but a representative of the “type” of girls who stray by making “foolish choices”. Like everyone, women too can make bad choices, but their missteps and blunders should not be viewed through the distorted lens of patriarchy. To…

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