The three live in the DDA apartments of Vasant Kunj – and at least two of them, Shailaja and Dini, hardly come across as “aunties”, a word flung at middle-aged women to age-shame them. Nilima is the only one who is perhaps auntie-like in her appearance and manners as she loves to keep an eye on her neighbourhood, especially women, whether they are dating, married, divorced or separated.

While Nilima and Dini have been long-time residents, Shailaja has just moved in from a Defence Colony barsati. It’s the garrulous Nilima who spots Shailaja and invites her over for a cup of tea. Though their worlds are poles apart, Shailaja, a contract lecturer at a Delhi University college, reluctantly warms up to Nilima. To heal from her break-up, Shailaja is preparing to teach Popular Fiction (Gone With The Wind) to her students, which she thinks would prove therapeutic.

When Nilima learns on her wedding anniversary that her husband is cheating on her, she is devastated. In that desperate moment, she knocks on Dini’s door, whom she knows as a women’s rights activist, to discuss her “marital betrayal”. Dini has had a long day herself, and is trying hard to keep “VS” out of her mind and life. She isn’t quite pleased to see Nilima, but hears her out – wondering if Nilima’s husband was “plain stupid or subconsciously dealing a blow to his wife?”

Dini, who works for a foreign-funded NGO in Delhi, is attracted to VS, a Dalit man who shares her passion for improving the lot of the downtrodden. While Shailaja had somehow convinced her upper middle-class parents to allow her to move in with her boyfriend, Dini is sure her conservative Brahmin father would never accept VS.

As the three make sense of the new turns in their lives, Nilima seeks solace in Buddhist chanting, which she believes will bring back her husband. Shailaja’s contract is terminated by her lecherous principal when she denies him sexual favours. She is fired on the grounds that she asked her students to “…to think about love…You could ask your boyfriends what they understand by the word love”. She messes things further by letting her ex-boyfriend have access to her once again. Meanwhile, Dini’s romantic association with VS throws up new challenges. She can’t hide her past from him anymore, her daughter refuses to accept him, and she finds herself in deep trouble at work too. Nilima urges Dini and Shailaja, whom she has introduced to each other, to try Buddhist chanting too, though her own long sessions haven’t quite helped her reunite with her husband. Dini and Shailaja become confidantes and support each other, even as the traditional Nilima is a sort of misfit in their modern lifestyles.

Marwah does a pretty good job of showcasing women navigating conflicting identities and desires at almost 40. She throws in other characters too who fight over water shortages and electricity bills and broken planters – details that help build up the microcosm that is Vasant Kunj.

However, sometimes, the writing is confusing and reveals the author’s own biases. When Shailaja sits in her classroom and looks at the students who have opted for her course in Popular Fiction: Six out of the eight students also wore salwar-kameez. The kind of clothes mummy would buy… How would she teach these girls about desire and its fulfilment, about flights of fantasy, about daydreams realised in fiction, about the purgation of reality? She looked at them closely. Two were wearing jeans and one a lace top. There was hope.

The portrayal of Nilima, who anchors this world of Vasant Kunj aunties, is often annoying and cliched. A homemaker who cannot speak fluent English and is not exposed to the world in the manner that Dini and Shailaja are, Nilima is a caricature.

Marwah, who says this book is part-fiction and part-autobiographical, throws in a full-fledged chapter detailing her own travails – when she walked out on her husband in her late thirties and moved to Vasant Kunj with her two sons. In a chapter titled 2024, Now, she writes that she was Nilima, Shailaja and Dini in Vasant Kunj. “So, I have written about the women I have played, the women I brush past daily, whose voices I mimic to dissemble mine. Slowly, it became unclear to me which voice was essentially mine. Vasant Kunj has reconstituted an essential me with all the women living close – too close – to each other…”

This chapter interrupted the flow of the story and could have been accommodated as an Introductory Note or an Afterword.

Despite its catchy title, Aunties of Vasant Kunj doesn’t have the weight to hold the interest of the serious fiction reader. The premise is great and some of the intelligent conversations between characters are absorbing but the over-the-top portrayals and cliches are tiresome. However, it works perfectly as light reading on a leisurely weekend.

Lamat R Hasan is an independent journalist.