Anxious and sullen, Deven, the protagonist of In Custody, is to all appearances as unmemorable as the town Mirpore in which he lives. Inhabited mainly by petty tradesmen, Mirpore is one among the many populous but nondescript provincial outposts littering the dry dusty crossroads of the northern Indian plains. It has no history to speak of, no distinguished landmarks; its reason for existence, rather like Deven's, is a mystery. If Mirpore can be said to have a focus at all, it resides in what the narrator calls an ‘addiction to total dehydration’ (IC 15). Deven's life as a teacher of Hindi literature in the inadequately resourced and academically suspect Lala Ram Lal College is as arid as the town itself, punctuated occasionally by bouts of humiliation when his ineptitude in the classroom is greeted by the students’ derisory laughter. Like Mirpore which has no historical or cultural significance and where the infrastructure is poorly built and shoddily maintained, Deven has a minimal support system in his work and family, and survives the everyday in a state of need rather than actual material privation.

But, unlike Mirpore, he has a hidden centre, an inner resource which sustains him in his otherwise desiccated existence. He harbours a passion, well hidden from college, for Urdu poetry, especially the work of Nur, the once illustrious poet whose time, as the novel is to show, is well past. In this passion is embedded Deven's desire for an alternative world; in the novel, the verdant symbolism and lush romantic landscapes of Urdu lyric are pointedly contrasted with the aridity of Mirpore and his monotonous life. This passion is mapped onto the seduction which the metropolis holds for the small-town dweller – a classic third-world trajectory which Desai has earlier plotted in narrating the tensions between the rural and the urban in The Village by the Sea. To Deven, Delhi, where Nur lives, is ‘the capital with its lost treasures of friendships, entertainment, attractions and opportunities’; between Mirpore and Delhi is an ‘impassable desert’ that has turned into a ‘no-man's land that lies around a prison’ (IC 18) where Deven is incarcerated by ennui and the growing and debilitating realization that life for him holds nothing but disappointment.