No one can live your life for you. So what can you actually expect from the people in it?

People can care about you. They can sit beside you, lend you money, help you prepare for the interview. But when the door closes, the answers still have to come from you. And when the decision goes wrong, the choice was still yours.

In this short, direct book, Shubham Chandel questions the promises we attach to words like friend, love and belonging. Drawing on ordinary moments from his own life, from a bike accident a month after buying his first bike to a nine-hour-late delivery he could have prevented, he looks at what we owe each other and what we never could.

Across ten chapters, he explores why help can be real without becoming a debt, the difference between a role and a pretence, why expectations are not the same as care, why closeness doesn't give anyone ownership, and what it means to be alone without pretending you're never lonely.

This is not a book of rules. The author doesn't hide his contradictions, and he expects you to disagree. If you do, he asks only one thing: look at your reason.