Like a vibrant quilt, Namrata Poddar’s novel Border Less presents the elaborately patterned lives of single mothers, Nepali maids, workers in Mumbai luxury hotels, and immigrant wives who come together to develop strong friendships. Along the way, Poddar, a vivacious storyteller, portrays an extensive range of Rajasthani arts, including painting and dance, and Marwari havelis largely unknown to Western readers.

The opening chapter introduces a woman named Dia, a worker in a travel agency’s call center in Mumbai. Dia races against a screen timer while answering her American customers’ queries; she is also caring for her father, who is fighting cancer, and attending Bollywood dance practices. The prospect of promotion, the gateway to her dream of a life in the United States with her boyfriend Aziz, is portrayed with delicacy and precision. A hostile call from a customer named Vicky, who immediately vents her resentment of workers like Dia, who are “stealing” jobs to which she feels Americans like herself are entitled, wrecks Dia’s prospects. In order to cope, Dia seeks solace in drinks laced with extra-strong cannabis.

Wanting to create new memories and stories beyond merely surviving, Dia wanders from India through Mauritius to California. Her expedition, which involves switching homes, jobs, and love interests, becomes an integral part of the plot. At one point she confesses to her mother that she wants to take root somewhere and settle down, and that she is waiting for the right person. She is like Nargis, their neighbor’s pet, a restless love bird, always flapping her wings as if ready to fly out of her cage any moment. “Dia couldn’t help smiling at the reputedly monogamous baby parrot. Nargis and her, didn’t they belong to the same race?”

Characters are introduced through interrelated chronicles. Joohi, one of Dia’s cousins, holds on to her emotional anchor — fabrics in Rajasthani colors of turmeric, yellow, orange, rani pink, maroon, and red — to cope with her imperious husband and mother-in-law. After she is widowed, this woman who once managed three maids is reduced to managing three-plus jobs. One day she treats herself to a rickshaw ride and an orange-and-pink stole made from pure silk. Her clinging to these little luxuries evokes a prior episode in which her husband, just days before his demise, had surprised her with a silk scarf. Poddar tenderly narrates the moment: “How good the touch of silk felt. And how the orange-pink accentuated her chai skin under the [room’s] soft lights.” Another cousin, Rani, grew up with Dia and is like a sibling to her. Although they are oceans apart, they reconnect in the rhythm of a childhood dance that their bodies still remember. “Dia and Rani twirled faster and faster, raising their arms and chins to the heavens as if both were reaching out to Grandma — an ethereal family reunion where no one led the other, no one read the other.”

A keen observer of class and gender biases, Poddar candidly indicates how the voice of money commands members of extended families, particularly women. Loud voices emerge from an awareness of bank balances. Meanwhile a middle-class mother with no husband or son becomes invisible to her wealthier relatives. After Poddar’s immigrant wives become friends, their chats provide a window into their marriages, revealing gendered inequities that will be familiar to both desi and American readers: expectations for a new daughter-in-law to cook and serve guests at family parties, conservative notions of how only men deserve breaks, a husband who considers his side of the family only. The basic inequality is captured in a scene of men relaxing while women cook: “In the kitchen, women continued to labor over cutting boards, by the stove, the side buffet, and the sink” while “in the backyard, the men hovered over a temporary bar with their drinks and appetizers in hand.” One of Poddar’s characters reflects on such marriages: “Lemme put these two together, one so conditioned to take, another so conditioned to give, and have them commit to each other for life.”

But Poddar is not narrowly focused on the family. She widens her lens to include relationships beyond the familial. She shows women from all walks of life traveling to and from work, utilizing their commute to cut vegetables and play Antakshari (singing) games. A Nepali maid named Shalu, condemned by her circumstances to a kind of life imprisonment, provides another focal point; she can’t run away because her wages pay for her father’s surgery and other essential expenses. There are passing references to terrorist attacks at a fancy hotel in Mumbai and to a Hollywood movie showcasing life in Mumbai’s poor neighborhoods. A local worker’s discomfort with being photographed by white visitors is subtly described: “At least the goras at Raj were there for a reason: a wedding, a business meeting, or just to enjoy the food. They did not gape at him and his buddies as if they were circus dogs.”

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