In Babyji, Dawesar paints a Delhi of crime, rape, dirt, blackouts, backwardness, residual colonialism, domestic violence, and arranged marriages, a city where promising young people often see their only option as going to the United States, thus contributing to the brain drain and setting in motion a vicious circle.
•
In contrast to this scenario is Animika herself, a budding intellectual who devours books—among other authors, she has read Dostoevsky, Sartre, Kundera and Bradbury and reads Nabokov's Lolita during her trip to Kasauli—and at school excels at maths and physics.
•
Set in 1980s Delhi, India, it recounts the coming of age and the sexual adventures and fantasies of a 16-year-old bespectacled schoolgirl, the only child of a Brahmin family.