Chick-lit in two flavours
Shinie Antony reviews two books about girls who become women in contrasting milieus and come of age to blaze their own trails.
Candace Bushnell takes us into Carrie Bradshaw’s life before Sex and the City happened. When Carrie was a small-town girl with big, big dreams. In The Carrie Diaries, we get to meet a pre-sophisticated, un-wined and un-dined virgin who goes through the same trials and tribulations as any student her age. Boys, studies, make-up, make-out sessions, impromptu striptease, the hunt for birth control… Carrie essentially writes us a foreword to her later escapades.
‘Whoever we are here, we might be princesses somewhere else. Or writers. Or scientists. Or presidents. Or whatever the hell we want to be that everyone else says we can’t,’ Carrie announces at the end of the first chapter.
Castlebury High is where the action is, or where the action is not, as Carrie clearly yearns for the TV stardom she knows is her birthright. Meanwhile, she must reveal her mental ups and downs to better explain her ensuing success. She displays her sartorial eccentricities, which can also be termed as the budding style quotient in her blood, and has verbal calisthenics inside of her head to hint at the wisecracking woman she is going to grow into.
While the target age group of readers for a matured Carrie is another, more graying generation, this babe is clearly YA (young adult) fiction. Agreed it is chick-lit, but it is chick-lit for the teenage soul. The concerns and carrying-outs of a pubescent Carrie can only be of interest to diehard Sex and the City fans, who bitterly regret having missed out growing next door to Carrie.
But having said that — that is, having clarified the readership vintage — one has to admit that the author has stirred in all the right masalas for such a book.
There is also, for those who are holding their breath for the arrival of the others, the invisible entry of Samantha Jones at the fag end. The handbag on the cover has a say in the story. In an early display of her clotheshorse future, Carrie transforms her late mother’s bequeathed bag into a gush-worthy accessory after her sister’s attempt at sabotaging it. ‘If it’s deliberate,’ Carrie says about her modifications, ‘it’s fashion.’ It is a bag with her name on it, written by her own young hands. Her boyfriend, Sebastian, says like all fool men who have no clue how much a woman can do without a kidney but not without a bag: ‘It’s a purse, Carrie.’ And Carrie’s comeback to that proves her potential as a would-be writer.
Not enough action, but plenty of analysis - hmmm, one could say much like Sex and the City.
Cutting stereotypes
Sajita Nair marches into a hitherto male territory with She’s a Jolly Good Fellow. Fresh from her days in the army, she cuts through stereotypes as smoothly as she tells a story, taking us into the world of bara khanas, dining in, dining out, rations, night duties and the stripes on the shoulders of senior officers’ wives.
Here is chick-lit in boots and berets, with Deepa the toughie and Anjali the softie representing the two ends of female existence. How feminism and femininity get swapped at the end makes up most of this story set against the rugged landscape of army life apart from the obvious external adjustments – cutting hair short, to tuck under cap wearing ill-stitched trousers as uniform, the two are altered inside out.
As they salute their seniors between the scenic Darjeeling mountains and the Teesta river, their minds are bubbling with the newest of queries. When do they stop being a team player and become a spoilsport? Is uniform identity? Are they madams or sahabs? If taken POWs, won’t the atrocities be greater against women? What on earth is hydrocele and why can’t a man march with it? Last but not the least, where do they hang their delicates to dry?
Mess cooking and flower arrangement, even fashion shows come their way, as ‘no one seemed to care that we had beat most males in their own domain, the firing range’. Even during the ninth month of pregnancy, Anjali wears her usual uniform with the belt cutting into her burgeoning belly only because there are no uniform regulations for women in the process of multiplying.
She has balls, she is a she-man – these are some of the comments that come no-nonsense officer Deepa’s way, while Anjali is a Yash Chopra movie heroine in chiffons and bindis. Many heartbreaks and hiccups later, the two women find their feet, or boots.
‘Everyone joined in the chorus and tossed me up again and again. I felt my bra ride up and my belt and boots come off. But I didn’t care. There were few occasions when I felt like this, when I felt such a high – I could almost pluck the stars,’ Deepa sums up in the end, bringing ambition, nobility, patriotism and gender equality all into the picture.
She’s a Jolly Good Fellow follows a path all its own, going into places no desi girlie book has been before. It bravely places itself directly in the line of fire where fatigues fiction is concerned. Definitely chick-lit with a purpose.
