Book review | Not Safe for Work is a racy tale of city, a lie and everything in between

Author Radhika Agrawal's workplace romance between Kavya and Neil makes way for an affecting love story where a woman learns to see Mumbai, herself differently.

One picks up Not Safe for Work, expecting the familiar choreography of an office romance: two attractive people, professional hostility, proximity doing its inevitable work. Though author Radhika Agrawal does give all of that, but somewhere between a stolen bite of vegetable uttapam and a late-night brainstorming session, one realises that the book’s more interesting love story is not between Kavya Mehra and Neil Desai! It’s between Kavya and the city of Mumbai.

Cover of Author Radhika Agrawal's new book, Not Safe for Work.

Spotlight falls on Kavya, who is a senior graphic designer at Jharokha, and has spent three-and-a-half years regarding the city as an adversary: expensive, exhausting, indifferent. Mussoorie is home, and Mumbai is the price she pays for her ambition. Neil, her maddeningly privileged intern, arrives with the sort of insouciance that can only belong to a man whose safety net is considerably wider than hers. When he discovers her tiny professional lie, their equation tilts deliciously: the woman who is technically his senior suddenly has something to fear from him.

Agrawal is at her best when she lets the romance germinate in the banalities of working life. A favourite detail is their ‘404’ code: Kavya appears at Tanya’s desk, whispers it, and her friend shuts her laptop without asking questions. Minutes later, at Santosh Sagar, Tanya is stealing Kavya’s uttapam while declaring Neil hot. It’s such a small, perfectly observed piece of office life that one trusts the book to bring a little more for it.

Neil, too, is more deftly drawn than his privileged-boy exterior suggests. His calling Rajat ‘uncle’, his infuriating ease at Jharokha, his attempts to prove himself to his father: these gradually prise open the armour of the charming man-child. More importantly, he sees in Kavya what she has become too myopic to see in herself.

But it’s Mumbai that quietly steals the pages and the sub-plot. Locals, monsoon, Marine Drive, traffic, cramped commutes and more define how the city begins to stand tall as a millstone and ends as an accomplice. Neil does not merely make Kavya fall for him; he teaches her to look again. That is the novel’s most affecting conceit.

The book is not without its familiar rom-com machinery, and occasionally one wishes Agrawal would trust silence as much as banter. Yet her conversational prose has an unstudied warmth, and her Bollywood-inflected humour keeps the narrative nimble.

The story ends leaving this reviewer thinking that perhaps the title is slightly misleading. Not Safe for Work is certainly about what happens when desire trespasses into the workplace. But its deeper subject is the dangerous business of allowing a place, a person, and even a version of yourself, to become home.

And Mumbai, by the final page, feels less like a city than a seduction.

Title: Not Safe For Work

Author: Radhika Agrawal

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Price: ₹350

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