Nona Uppal’s Second Book, ‘Call It Coincidence’, Captures the Messy Magic of Love

There’s something shifting, quietly but unmistakably, in the world of Indian romance fiction. A new generation of writers is rewriting what it means to fall in love, especially in this instagram filter generation. Gone are the over the top fantasies; in their place are messy and relatable stories that mirror the emotional landscape of modern Indian twenty-somethings. From confession culture to the rise of homegrown rom-coms, young readers today aren’t looking for perfect characters. They want people who feel like them: confused of modern labels, and utterly complicated.

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Enter Nona Uppal, one of the most exciting voices of this new wave. Her writing blends the old school cinematic charm with emotional intimacy, the kind that feels like you’re reading a personal journal at the same time. After the success of her debut, Uppal returns with Call It Coincidence (Penguin Random House), a second-chance romance that dives straight into the fractures and fullness of millennial/Gen Z relationships.

At the centre of this new work live two characters, Naina and Vatsal. Naina, she admits, is where she channelled her own troubles with love: her fears and her past wounds, or the commitment issues she never shies away from discussing, even as she laughs and points out she’s been in an eight-year relationship. All the family dynamics, and the kinds of heartbreak that quietly shape us—Naina carries many of those shadows.

But Vatsal is a prototype of a man who keeps appearing in the lives of women everywhere, a man who loves intensely until the moment things get too real. “He’s a canon event in every girl’s life,” she says, half-joking but wholly accurate. She wasn’t interested in villainising him. Instead, she wanted to understand him. Why do certain men bolt just when the feelings deepen? Why do they struggle to show up? Vatsal became a composite of men she or her friends dated. In writing him, she was also giving herself closure, to conversations that never happened, endings she never got, answers she never received.

Together, Naina and Vatsal represent something larger than their romance. To her, they are two brilliant, deeply feeling individuals who are still very much works in progress. They’re flawed by the ways they were loved—or not loved—growing up. They are generous lovers but unhealed humans. They meet at the right time but aren’t ready for each other the first time around, because neither has finished the internal journeys they must take. They’ve lived in her head for so long, over a year and a half of writing, that she misses them like friends she hasn’t spoken to in a while.

While writing her last book, Jab We Met’s cinematic DNA ran through her pages. This time, the language of inspiration shifted. Instead of films, music took over, specifically old Hindi songs. Kishore Kumar’s Pyaar Diwana Hota Hai became the invisible emotional thread running through the book, and Phir Miloge Kabhi shaped several key moments. “In my mind, the story plays like a montage of sepia-tinted old songs,” she says. “These songs carry truths that don’t age, open declarations of love andlonging. What Naina and Vatsal experience is perennial. It would happen the same way in the time of dating apps or in the time of handwritten letters.”

When asked about a quote or lyric that defines love for her, Uppal doesn’t reach for English literature or contemporary poetry. Instead, her instincts go back to Hindi—her mother tongue. The first word that comes to her mind is “pyaar,” and instinctively, she returns to Pyaar Diwana Hota Hai, a song she has carried with her since childhood. She laughs about not being able to recall a perfect quote on the spot but mentions something she wrote years ago that still lingers in her mind: “Every love story is a tragedy if you write it long enough.” For someone who writes about heartbreak with tenderness, the sentiment feels apt.

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The Desi romance space has grown dramatically between her first book and now, especially within the booming “desi romance BookTok” wave. She’s thrilled by the rise of contemporary Indian writers capturing the nuances of Indian love. “We’ve loved in uniquely Indian ways for centuries.” What excites her most is the unapologetic wave of romance writing emerging today, driven by an urgency to portray healthy relationships at a time when mainstream cinema still sensationalises toxic ones. 

Uppal's writing process is far from glamorous. With a full-time job, writing becomes something she must consciously carve time for. Her ideal writing day begins by leaving her home, packing a bag, heading to a café, and simply… watching. People-watching is her muse. A couple on a first date. Friends reuniting after years. A person fiddling with an ashtray while smoking. She takes it all in for hours—six, sometimes more, and later writes scenes grounded in the emotional truth of what she observed.

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She shares one such moment that didn’t make it into the book but stayed with her: a street dog wandered into a café one day and quietly curled up beside her seat. For an hour, no one noticed. It felt like a secret little world between the two of them. Until someone finally spotted the dog and chaos broke loose. She wrote that scene anyway, not because it served the plot, but because it held a certain human tenderness she wanted to capture. “Even if it doesn’t make it into this book,” she says, “it might belong somewhere else.”

In many ways, that’s also how her books come together, small human truths stitched into a story about love and the courage to try again.

Read more, 

Nona Uppal: Gen Z Didn't Invent The Chaos Of Love, It’s Always Been This Messy