Stock of caricatures

Chetan Bhagat spoofs globe-trotting Indian men who continue to look for smart, caring and humble wives... just like in the matrimonial ads.

“Why can’t women get a wife?” wonders Radhika, as the airhostess tucks her in with a sheet and a pillow. “Debu wasn’t the only one. I also wanted someone like this lady to take care of me,” she sighs.

One Indian Girl, Chetan Bhagat’s latest pulp fiction, is peppered with smart one-liners like these that make him appear like a champion of women’s needs. Feminism, the old buzzword, is given a contemporary context and exploited to the hilt by the paperback pasha who knows exactly what clicks with his category of readers. If you’re not looking for literature, Bhagat’s formula works well —odd  title, faulty grammar and all.

Radhika Mehta, never considered good-looking because she has a “wheatish” complexion, is a scholar who finds her “nerd heaven” at IIM Ahmedabad. Her sister, Aditi, on the other hand, is a beauty and all she wanted to do was get married. “She (Aditi) had two criteria for her groom. One, the boy had to be rich. Second, well, there was no second criterion really.” Aditi married the owner of two Honda CR-Vs and three sanitary-ware shops in downtown Paharganj. The satire is pretty obvious.
As with his earlier stories, Bhagat sets this one too against a professional background to impart an aura of authenticity. After completing her management studies, Radhika joins Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that pays her a mind-boggling salary in dollars; and the lay reader gets an interesting peek into the world of investment banking and distressed debt. Tough, intelligent and hard-working, Radhika soon becomes the star performer in her company.

But the higher she soars in her career, the more worried her mother gets. Where will she find a groom with a salary to match Radhika’s? Like the typical north-Indian and south-Indian mothers in Two States, Radhika’s mother, too, is the butt of much humour. Lining up owners of sanitary ware and medicine shops as prospective grooms for her daughter, Mrs Mehta is totally oblivious to Radhika’s high ranking in the world of investment banking.

To get back at her mother, Radhika rejects most of the men her mother suggests, some on the basis of looks, others because they earned only a few lakhs a year. “Despite all my feminist leanings I didn’t want to be with someone who made so much lesser then me,” confesses Radhika, in Chetan Bhagat English. The mother-daughter spats are fun but, eventually, how different is Radhika?

A glamorous jet-setting lifestyle, sleeping with her handsome boss on a Philippine beach, cracking billion-dollar deals, Radhika seems to have it all... And yet, she pines for middle-class domesticity; but her apparently liberated boyfriends cannot visualise her as a wife. They are your stereotypical men — with set, compartmentalised ideas about exciting girlfriends and homely wives. One Indian Girl doesn’t say anything new about Indian men, women, and their mothers, but there is plenty of pop psychology.

“In real life, the girl throws a party for her guy’s promotion, but the guy can’t handle the girl’s bonus,” points out Radhika to her first boyfriend, a chauvinist in a liberal’s clothing. Nevertheless, she is willing to chuck up her career to pamper his ego and be a good mother to a brood of kids. So much for feminism! Beneath her Zara, GAP and Prada labels, Radhika turns out to be not too different from the middle-class, west-Delhi girls she had made fun of, craving for male attention and ready to make unreasonable compromises in marriage.

Bhagat, it’s reported, went through the painful process of waxing his body hair to understand what women undergo regularly. “Like people do method acting, I did method writing,” he has said in one interview. But feminism is not just skin deep. To trace the graph of Radhika’s self-discovery required a far deeper understanding of a successful career-woman’s mind. Just like putting words in the mouth of a creative associate in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, New York, required a better command over language. When Radhika pushes away a plate of fattening food, the ad-man protests, “You only bought it, baby.” No wonder he doesn’t rise too fast in his organisation. 

Bad grammar and flawed character sketches notwithstanding, one can see the badshahs of Bollywood lining up at Bhagat’s Pali Hill office, to sign a multi-core deal with him, to make a candy-floss film set in New York, Hong Kong, London, Philippines, and yes, middle-class Delhi too; padded with caricatures of mothers and buas, the big fat Indian wedding, foot-tapping songs, Manish Malhotra costumes, and cheeky dialogues.

If Bhagat’s books have become an industry in themselves, their celluloid versions are doing equally well (Three Idiots, Kai Po Che, Two States); and one begins to wonder if this canny ex-banker writes now for readers, viewers, or both?

One Indian Girl
Chetan Bhagat
Rupa
2016, pp 280
Rs. 88