‘The only way I could understand my last meeting with Azhar was if I could view it as something that happened to everybody, that all women were walking around with giant secrets lodged inside them and on most days, they collapsed with the weight, but on some days they could laugh it off over a glass of cheap wine.’ That’s what Sophia, the protagonist, thinks as she suffers through the physiological and emotional aftermath of an abortion. She has had to go through it by herself without her married boyfriend’s support.

The loneliness of the modern Indian woman and her inner turmoil within romantic relationships is expertly dealt with: ‘Somehow, the idea of a breakup or separation doesn’t seem too dramatic on paper. It seems manageable, feminist almost, but in real life, with each heartbreak, I feel closer to spinning totally out of control. I read in an article that anxiety was a manifestation of pain suppressed, but that felt too simplistic an explanation for the emptiness I felt.’

Sophia’s close friend Medha gives her a reality check: “All you have to cry is how pathetic men - whom you consciously seek out to compound the hate you feel for yourself - treat you, just like I predicted they would. It’s not cute or funny anymore. It’s pathetic and needy.” Sophia’s messy love life is a reflection of the reality of many women who accept the meagre love they think they deserve.

A single child of an Arya Samaji mother and a Sunni Muslim father, who are now divorced, Sophia learns to greet half her family with salaams and the other half with namastes. To add layers of complexity, she grew up in Muslim Dubai and now lives and works in Hindu-majority areas in Delhi and Bombay.

She has a hard time finding a place to stay in Delhi within her budget. Her conservative landlady, Savitri, wants to throw her out because she doesn’t want a tenant who comes and goes as she pleases, smokes, and brings men back to her place. When she accuses Sophia of “polluting” the minds of kids in the neighbourhood, the latter points out that her 10-year-old son watches porn. Savitri isn’t the only one troubled by Sophia’s agency. When she moves in with a boyfriend, he harasses her on social media and sets fire to her belongings when she is away from home.

Through it all, she struggles to fund the life of her dreams. She had wanted to be an activist or an artist, or at least be rich but she is none of that. She could have been a party girl or found a sugar daddy to support her life, which she wanted to spend swimming and writing poetry. Having failed at all of it, she becomes addicted to amphetamine. But though she lives through multiple professional and personal failures, Sophia refuses to see herself as a victim and refuses to conform to anyone else’s ideas of what her life should be.

Still, she is a misfit wherever she goes and her feelings of rootlessness are affirmed when even her half-Hindu identity and her NRI privileges cannot shield her when violence erupts in Delhi in late 2019 and cities across the country see protests against the citizenship amendment laws. Horrified by the increasing communal violence, her father demands that Sophia return to Dubai, where he lives. Sadly, she isn’t “Muslim enough” for the place. “If I could close my eyes, align with my Muslim side and play by all the rules, Dubai would open up to me like a pearl in an oyster,” Sophia thinks.

If only her professional life could offer her a sense of community. But that is not to be either. When she applies for a fellowship, her script is called out for “having a heteronormative lens, putting men on a pedestal and most importantly, not being Muslim enough”. ‘My foreign degree alienates me from my peers here, with their FTII education and their salt-of-the-earth films. I’m not quite hip or immigrant enough for the diaspora either. I have no other skills except putting pen to paper and being ironically detached from everything, which is probably less of a sexy artistic disposition and more a symptom of low-grade depression,” Sophia says. To add to the irony, the funding for her project depends upon appealing to the sensibilities of a privileged Hindu woman who thinks ending her sentences with salaams makes her truly liberal.

No Place To Call My Own perfectly captures the exhaustion of contemporary women, especially those who attempt to make a living from art. It is a compelling read.

Sharmistha Jha is an independent writer and editor.