None of Us Are Strangers by Jay Divyam | Dr. Sameer Gudhate Asks: How Well Do We Really Know the People Around Us?

We call someone a stranger when we know nothing about them.

But perhaps the more accurate definition is this:

A stranger is someone whose story we haven't heard yet.

Jay Divyam's None of Us Are Strangers begins with a little girl, an absent mother and a man who never intended to become responsible for either of them.

Veer Mehra is at a Mumbai party when a woman asks him to look after her daughter, Aaruhi, for a few minutes.

She doesn't return.

Those few minutes become hours. Then days. And the seemingly simple act of helping a child pulls Veer into a mystery involving hidden connections, corruption, buried secrets and people who would rather keep the past exactly where it is.

That is the thriller.

But it isn't what interested me most.

What interested me was what the thriller does to the word in its title.

Stranger.

We use that word far too easily.

We see a person's face, their clothes, their behaviour, perhaps one decision they have made, and construct a version of them in our heads. We rarely stop to ask what happened before the moment we encountered them.

Divyam does.

And he does it through characters rather than lectures.

Veer's relationship with Aaruhi is particularly important because it begins without intention. He doesn't enter her life because he has been waiting to become someone's protector. Circumstance puts him there.

Then responsibility does something strange.

It creates attachment.

That attachment gradually changes the meaning of the relationship. A child who initially represents an inconvenience becomes a person Veer cannot simply walk away from.

And that made me think about how many relationships in our own lives begin without announcement.

A colleague becomes a friend.

A neighbour becomes family.

A casual conversation becomes a lifelong memory.

A stranger becomes someone whose absence we eventually feel.

Perhaps relationships are not always built through grand moments. Sometimes they begin with something much smaller:

Someone needed us, and we decided not to walk away.

This is where None of Us Are Strangers moves beyond being a mystery thriller.

Because almost everyone in the story seems to be carrying something.

A secret.

A loss.

A wound.

A mistake.

A version of the past that hasn't been fully confronted.

And once we know even a little of someone's history, our interpretation of their behaviour begins to change.

This is one of the uncomfortable truths the novel quietly explores.

We judge people from the outside because the inside is unavailable to us.

We see anger without the hurt that preceded it.

We see distance without the abandonment that created it.

We see someone's choices without knowing the choices they were once denied.

Of course, understanding someone doesn't automatically excuse everything they do.

That distinction matters.

And I wish the novel had pushed that tension even further.

Because there is a fascinating question sitting beneath its emotional core:

How much should knowing someone's pain change our judgement of their actions?

Empathy can explain behaviour.

It cannot always justify it.

That is where I found myself wanting the novel to linger a little longer.

The book's Mumbai setting also contributes significantly to this idea. Mumbai is a particularly effective city for a story about strangers. Millions of lives occupy the same physical space while remaining emotionally invisible to one another.

People cross paths constantly.

They rarely cross stories.

Divyam brings those stories together through mystery.

The result is a narrative in which the suspense comes not only from discovering what happened, but from discovering how seemingly unrelated lives became connected in the first place.

And that structure gives the title its real weight.

None of us are strangers sounds like a statement of comfort.

I don't think it is entirely comforting.

Because if it is true, then we also have to accept that every person we casually dismiss may be carrying a history we know nothing about.

That difficult person.

That lonely person.

That person who seems unnecessarily angry.

That person who suddenly disappears from our lives.

We may never know the full story.

And perhaps that is the point.

The novel also benefits from not making Veer an impossibly heroic figure. His significance comes from something more ordinary: he chooses to care.

That choice becomes increasingly consequential.

And perhaps that is one of the book's most human observations.

We often imagine that extraordinary people do extraordinary things.

Sometimes ordinary people simply refuse to stop caring.

The mystery keeps the pages turning. The characters give the mystery emotional stakes. But the idea that remained with me was much quieter.

How often do we mistake unfamiliarity for irrelevance?

We meet people every day whose lives briefly intersect with ours. Most disappear from our memory within minutes.

We call them strangers.

But what if “stranger” simply means:

a story we haven't been invited into?

Jay Divyam's debut doesn't make that question easy.

And it shouldn't.

Because knowing someone's story may make us more compassionate, but it may also make their choices more complicated.

Perhaps that is what makes None of Us Are Strangers work beyond its mystery.

It reminds us that people are rarely as simple as the moment in which we encounter them.

We meet the present version of a person.

We almost never meet everything that made them.

And maybe that is the real mystery.

Not who is hiding the truth.

But how much truth about another human being we can ever really know.

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