The Literary Mirror

Oberoi's second collection returns to the fictional Lakhani Chawl, a setting she has now used across two books and a handful of magazine pieces. The nine stories here share a building, a water problem, and a habit of stopping mid-scene, usually at the first drop of monsoon rain.

The strongest of them, 'Fourth Floor, No Lift', follows an elderly widow's daily negotiation with a staircase and says more about ageing in a Mumbai apartment than most full-length novels manage. The weakest, 'Wedding Season', tries the same trick with a marriage plot and finds the form too thin to hold the material.

Read together, the stories argue that a chawl is a kind of clock — everyone on a different floor, all keeping the same time. It is a tidy thesis, occasionally too tidy, but the writing earns the neatness more often than it presumes it.

“Oberoi writes endings the way a good editor writes cuts — a beat before you expect them.”