The Price of an Ordinary Life

A middle-class man in Delhi NCR loses his job — and a year strips away every assumption his family made about security.

The Price of an Ordinary Life is a family drama by Indian author Parvind Kumar following Raghav Sharma — not poor, not rich, an ordinary middle-class man with a home loan, two children, ageing parents, and a job he loses in the opening pages. What follows is a year of hospital bills, a credit card whose minimum due turns out to be a trap, a farmer father drowning in his own kind of debt, and a wife rediscovering the career she once set aside.

The novel follows three generations of one family — a grandfather who needed only enough to survive, a father taught to need enough to succeed, and children only beginning to ask what it means to be free — set between a North Indian village and a rapidly changing NCR.

It is a story about EMIs and dignity, about a sister who refuses a marriage proposal that reduced her to a checklist, and about how much an ordinary life actually costs when the bill finally comes due.