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Book Review: Voices in the Waiting Room by Mayank Gupta
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Fiction set in hospitals often leans on urgency, but Mayank Gupta chooses a different entry point. His debut turns its attention to the quieter corners of a U.S. medical center, observing five Indian doctors who move through the same space while carrying questions they never quite voice. The book isn’t driven by events as much as by the private weight these characters try to balance behind practiced composure.
Dr. Silva stands at the center, steady on the surface, until a bangle arrives and unsettles a past she has spent years keeping away from view. Around her, the others navigate their own unsettled ground: Ankit, who left India looking for a fairer system and ends up facing another form of exclusion; Pooja, whose calm exterior doesn’t always match what she feels; Shashi, bright yet oddly cut off; and Jindal, generous with others but unable to speak of his own grief. Gupta writes them not as symbols, but as people who move through life with unspoken heaviness.
He keeps the story at a measured pace. Nothing was hurried; nothing was engineered for shock. The novel sits with small pauses—unfinished conversations, hesitations, brief moments of connection—and lets those pauses reveal the lives behind the white coats. Through these details, the book hints at the medical hierarchies they’ve known in India and the subtler ones they meet abroad. The contrasts don’t appear as commentary; they show up naturally in how these characters think, withdraw, and navigate their days.
Managing five viewpoints is a demanding choice, and the book occasionally shows that strain. Some transitions arrive abruptly, and a few emotional turns would have benefited from staying longer with the character at hand. Even so, the intention remains clear: people who share a workplace rarely share the same history, and those histories shape how they respond to silence, responsibility, and belonging.
Gupta’s background in psychiatry lends precision to the novel without weighing it down. He pays attention to pauses, gestures, and small acts of avoidance—the sort of details that reveal more than dramatic confession ever could. His strength lies in understanding that much of a person’s life unfolds in the space between what is said and what is withheld.
The novel resists tidy resolutions. The novel does not take a dramatic turn or create an artificial catharsis. Instead, it follows its characters as they try to steady themselves in a country that offers opportunity but demands constant adjustment. The hospital becomes a room where they wait for clarity that doesn’t always arrive. That sense of suspension gives the book its tone—reflective, steady, and quietly observant.
It is a quiet, steady novel that asks the reader to sit with these doctors for a while and recognize the private weight behind the work they do every day.
Title: Voices in the Waiting Room
Author: Mayank Gupta
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Available at: Amazon, Flipkart, and Rupa Publications
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