Shunali Khullar Shroff on divorce and housing in urban India

India’s population exceeds 1.4 billion, nearly half of them women. In urban India, more women are educated, delay marriage, and live independently, alongside rising divorce rates in major cities. Mumbai, India’s financial capital, is home to more than 20 million people and ranks among the world’s most densely populated and expensive urban regions. There is no legal prohibition preventing landlords or housing societies from refusing accommodation based on marital status.

In practice, unwritten ideas of respectability—particularly concerning divorced and single women—determine who is allowed to rent and who is not. Sexist injustice is the basis of Shunali Khullar Shroff’s work. A Mumbai-based writer, Shroff writes across fiction, memoir, essays, and cultural commentary, with a sustained focus on marriage, class, money, and women’s interior lives in urban India. She is the author of the bestselling novel Love in the Time of Affluenza (Penguin India, 2010) and the memoir Battle Hymn of a Bewildered Mother (Penguin India, 2015). Shroff wrote The Wrong Way Home (Bloomsbury India, December 2025) as a response to rising divorce in India.

“While a divorced man is easily accepted by society, there’s still an expectation that if a woman hasn’t managed to find someone, or keep someone, and have a family, it must somehow be her fault.

“Even in modern India, a single, divorced woman who is attractive, financially independent, and knows her own mind is seen as slightly dangerous. Especially by couples. She is perceived as a threat to a carefully constructed social order.

“Single women often end up planning their own holidays, finding other single friends, and creating parallel lives. And if they are included in larger groups, it’s usually only when the numbers feel safe enough. Never in more intimate settings. You almost never see a couple and a single woman going away together for a weekend.

“Women who find themselves single in their thirties or early forties often assume they’ll meet someone else. But it doesn’t always turn out that way. And having to contend with that kind of loneliness—when most people around you have families—is something we don’t talk about honestly enough.”

Shroff’s book will resonate with women everywhere. “I wanted to be inside the head of a flawed woman—someone clinging to a marriage for all the wrong reasons, and then struggling with being quietly pushed out of the society she once belonged to. She wants to belong again. And somewhere along the way, she loses herself.”

Shunali Khullar Shroff is also the cohost of Not Your Aunty, which has ranked among the Top 100 Podcasts globally.