Delphi Rodriguez, a 20-something theatre artist in Bengaluru, has just realised that her debut play has been stolen from her.This is where Deepika Arwind’s debut novel ends, and begins for me.The novel, in essence, is simple. Delphi Rodriguez is a young woman living in 2000’s era Bengaluru. She is the adopted daughter of Asha, a single middle-aged woman, a bank worker – dutiful, ordinary, and supportive. Delphi stumbles into the world of the Bengaluru indie theatre scene after seeing a production of Sophocles’s Antigone. She is hand-led into this magical world by Laila Saldana, a theatre star who is revered and feared in the theatre circles.Good Arguments, Deepika Arwind, Simon and Schuster, 2026.She is introduced to V, her romantic interest and later co-founder of their theatre company; to the stony Shom, a theatre director with whom Laila shares a hot-cold relationship; and Dhananjay, a magnanimous, rich, and talented patron of the theatre. Along come a cast of interesting characters – John, the journalist at Daily Deccan; Delphi’s aunt Mensa, who runs an orphanage from where Delphi was adopted; Su, Delphi’s neighbour and best friend, among others.As the story rolls on, Delphi discovers theatre with new eyes, tackles the pangs of love and desire, and goes on intellectual adventures that once felt impossible. The novel is threaded like a play, where theatre is a character.Majorly, there are four plays that she is involved with here: Antigone, where Delphi plays the title character, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf that is staged at Navarasa, Bengaluru’s newest theatre space, Neer, Water, Paani where Delphi works as an assistant with an unbearable physical and emotional workload, and (Un)Fear, a play hijacked from Delphi’s original Women in Bangalore.Each of these plays marks significant turns in her life. While Antigone is like the lure that draws Delphi into this world of impossibilities, (Un)Fear leaves her feeling betrayed and used. The story feels like a play that has these three acts.In Act I, Delphi is a young explorer, who has bravely set sail in the perilous waters of theatre. She has gone against the sane advice of her mother. She has given up on the journalist job. She is left stranded without her best friend. Instead, she finds Laila, the forty-something fairy godmother she hated to have needed so badly.“Laila’s glassy, hazel eyes lit up after a rum and coke and a Gold Flake cigarette. She could tell us about the messy insides of this world, her heroes and villains, and the ways in which she had been wronged or had to defend her choices in the theatre, as a woman, as a visionary.”The incredible cocktail that is Dhananjay-Laila, and Laila-Shom, will consume her throughout the length of the book. Delphi starts to recognise the masks around her, yet is not quite prepared to see them slip. It is not time for that yet. It is time to introduce music as a major character in this tragi-comedy that is unfolding. In the midst of this eclectic chaos, V proposes they open a new theatre company. There is hope in the air, a new theatre space called Navarasa opens up in the city.Music chases her, inspires her, appears unasked – is played wilfully, for love, revenge, pain, and sometimes to forget. Delphi truly is the DJ of her life. From tracks that crazed teens listen to, to campy singles that hit just right at bars, music threads in and out of the book like lovers. Some even made me search them out on YouTube: ‘The Long Road’ by Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, ‘We Used to Wait’ by Arcade Fire. Some usual suspects appear, like ‘Forever Young’ by Bob Dylan, Tracy Chapman, The Beatles, and many more. Delphi even becomes a DJ for her theatre friends – the moment seems unreal.And yet, this was a time when social media had not trapped us like moths hovering onto fire. Things could be texted, written, played, and heard more physically. The earth breathed heavily from working hard.In Act II, Delphi is dealt the tough cards. She falls in love with V, and it becomes messier every day. Su becomes indifferent and a little crazy with her marriage. Delphi is involved in a play that puts her mental capacities to the test. She discovers the names of her birth parents.Delphi learns the cost of chasing the life she thinks she loves. But inside, it’s the same prejudices, the same power struggles, the same giddy feeling of being too young for anything, that fills her. It reminds us of that anxious and unsure space of being twenty-something, when you are living at the edge of a dream, and struggling not to shatter it. It’s that acute loneliness of rebellion every artist feels when they are starting out. Delphi still writes, dreams, loves, smokes, and drinks.A line from The Catcher in the Rye tries to describe this ride: “All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.”Delphi’s new play grows inside her. She wants to write about the extraordinariness of the ordinary – Women in Bangalore. Here the story tries to take a moment to breathe. Delphi is now an old warrior with deep battle scars. The romance of the theatre is struggling hard to keep up with the reality. It is the moment where theatre does not stop even for death.The ruthlessness of Laila and her compatriots disturb Delphi. She develops intense internal dialogues. These I found to be the real juice of the book. The mind of Delphi, laid open, feels much like the style of Arundhati Roy. The writer deftly swims on the line between fantasy and reality. Each external stimulation sends Delphi into instantaneous interior talk. These read like dense private journals. These reflections, reactions, and imaginings are familiar to us. For young urban women, this may read like an anthem. For the older ones like us, they are our intellectual link to that special time in our lives.In Act III, Delphi is hoisted onto the high seas, with news that her very own play will be staged at Navarasa. The heady times, however, soon start to unravel. Delphi’s play is caught in the intellectual traffic of the Delhi gang rape case. Suddenly, the need is for a new play, which represents the times more urgently. First the lines change, the sketches are tampered with, and in a matter of days, the whole play including the cast of characters is discarded. Delphi and V watch as their work and their roles turn to ashes. The molotov cocktail of Laila and Shom takes over completely.They write a new play and get it ready for production in ten days. Here Laila features as the singular and powerful voice that the country needs now – the hurt woman, who asks the questions Nirbhaya should have asked in her afterlife, before she was raped and maimed in a bus ride home. It starts with Laila talking to the audience:A silhouette appears near Delphi’s house. Emblematic of the atmosphere of fear that hangs in the air, the shape that hovers around the house slowly eats at Asha and Delphi. Delphi, the writer, starts to see her play, her identity, and her life slipping from her control. It’s too late when she realises that it is no longer her story that is being told. When she questions the unreal stealth with which her play was replaced, Laila leaves her on the road past midnight to teach her how it feels to be a woman in Bengaluru — an artistic experiment. Delphi feels the betrayal in her bones.Then, the tables turn once again. An international festival of plays in Berlin shows interest in Delphi’s original play, Women in Bangalore. The people in power at Navarasa pounce at this opportunity to represent the play they had discarded. It is no longer Delphi’s to decide or control her fate.At Navarasa, V and Delphi become the “production support” for the new play. The fall from writer and director is tragic and surreal. The play has been stolen from Delphi.As life comes full circle, Delphi ditches the curtain call of the new play, hails an auto home and plays cricket with Asha.The breathy optimism hangs in the air long after you turn the last page. I look at the neon orangish cover and think of whether every Indian woman has the same story to tell. In a country and a world where women continue to lose their voices, it’s not curtains yet.And scene.Sreemanti Sengupta is a Kolkata-based poet and freelance writer.