From the peeing standing up to the karate chop, this is a book that pops all the right buttons from the start. Ad ladies have been successfully making their presence in the chick lit world and Sonia Bahl is no exception. Her heroine who starts by looking very like a hero is Nira, determined to be one of the boys and resistant to any feminine claims. Nira’s best ally is ten years older than she is — Bir, a princeling with a sophisticatedly dysfunctional family and a talent for understanding exactly what it is Nira wishes for, starting with a daily dose of a Flury’s pink pastry.
With Bir’s help, Nira faces the school bully in a duel at forty punches and defeats him too. However, what Nira cannot defeat is gender. Teenage growing pains creep up and she begins to realise reluctantly that she is not a boy. Bahl covers waxing and other prickly problems perfectly and one suspects the whole experience was acutely autobiographical — as first novels are meant to be. As all chick lit readers know, Bir is the one, the only thing is how is Bahl going to get them together without being too obvious?
Given the age difference Bir has a head start on her and a Bengali Bo Derek wife called Dipika to boot. One vaguely wonders what the seductive Dipika would have to say about her husband’s interest in a cute young thing but she chooses to overlook the issue with bitchy disdain.
Bahl grapples with the time problem and sends Nira to grad school in the UK — again well detailed accounts of dealing with an insane Punjabi family determined to better the roommate system side table by side table. Bahl emphasises the noisy divisions between the life of the Indian diaspora and British students. Nita finds an escape in her friend Omar’s home.
Mercifully for the plot, Omar is gay and Bir keeps materialising at appropriate moments to set Nira’s heart beating faster armed with care packages. Of course, the path of true love never does run smooth, so complications are brought in to give Nira time to grow up and sort out the issues of Bir’s marriage.
Denizens of Kolkata will love the author’s snippets of her father poring over racebooks. Not to mention those irresistible pink pastries which seem to have vanished once and for all from the Flury’s counter on Park Street.
Anjana Basu is the author of Rhythms of Darkness
