Single and older: Manspotting

Title: Manspotting
Author: Ritu Bhatia
Published: March 2018, Speaking Tiger Books

This is a single-woman-in-the-city memoir with a twist. The woman in question is divorced with a child. It makes a nice change from dealing with the shenanigans of twenty-somethings, entertaining as they are.

In the opening chapter, like in any chick lit novel, we are given the context within which an urban, middle-class Indian woman must take a stab at romance. Unlike her Swedish or American classmates in an international school in Zambia, she was not allowed to attend sleepovers or socials, making her stick out as different and exposing her to racial slurs. Her parents remained steadfast in their commitment to their “Indian values”:

I hated being different but my parents weren’t worried about the social ostacrism

They were more concerned about perpetuating what they called “Indian culture and values”. Purity is the chief virtue of Indian women, my dad emphasized,

Boys were dangerous and not to be trusted since their main intention was to stake a claim to a girl’s virginity. They had the potential to ruin our lives.

When the family moved back to Nagpur, the rules that restricted unnecessary interaction with the opposite sex remained, but were updated: “if you sleep with him, you’ll have to marry him.” This didn’t stop her from having teenage romances though.

Bhatia’s situation is quite typical. On the one hand, her parents encourage her academic aspirations – even demand them. She is given her own scooter and her father teaches her how to drive a car himself. On the other, she is married off at 22. Lacking the energy to stand up to her father, she “capitulated after a brief show of resistance”.

“What else would I do?” she offers, even though the choice of studying abroad her parents offered her might seem preferable to some. Bhatia sleepwalking into marriage because she wanted “a life outside the laboratory and my bedroom” is symptomatic of the many women raised on fairytales who believe that their lives cannot begin without the awakening kiss of a prince.

Helene Cisoux notes in “Castration of Decapitation”:

Sleeping Beauty is lifted from her bed by a man because, as we all know, women don’t wake up by themselves. Man has to intervene, you understand. She is lifted up by the man who will lay her in the next bed so she may be confined to bed ever after, just as the fairy tales say.

Bhatia’s story has a twist, though. We find out what happens after the happy ever after, and then some. She refuses to lie in bed, literally. First, Bhatia finds herself entirely unprepared for married life:

Having been raised in a house where my academic achievements counted above domestic skills, I had no housekeeping talents to rely upon.

She “struggled with the role cast on me by the collective: that of decorative wallpaper in my husband’s life.” Although the prospect of motherhood scared her, she fell in love with her baby. It was not enough though. Bhatia began seeing a counselor, and realised that she had to start over.

Women who decide to start afresh in mid-life must face that most friends and family members of the same age are well “settled” with husbands, kids, in-laws, maids, drivers, chowkidars and dogs. My decision to turn my safe life into an uncertain one, contested sharply with the apparently secure and predictable existence of many in my circle who regarded me as crazy, stupid and selfish.

Bracing herself against the disapprobation of society, and dire warnings of the difficulty of going it alone as a woman, Bhatia moved into a dank apartment, her son shuttling between her home and her husband’s.

Bhatia does not go into a lot of detail of what this entailed, possibly to protect the extended family which she now has cordial relationships with. As a mother, this the part I have most interest in. I wish she had spelled out more the logistics that separation involves and some of the difficult conversations it would have entailed.

Early on, she fell into a romantic relationship that initially seemed perfect. It fell apart when she realised that it would have meant more of the life she had just escaped from. She was not without choices. She could have chosen to go back to her parents, her marital home or her new beau but “all they said look we won’t change our lives to accommodate you. But you’re welcome to join us if you want. At least you’ll be safe” .

She eschewed this safety and continued on the hard road of being single, a decision she often questioned the wisdom of, especially when she had to deal with plumbers and electricians who treated her like an idiot or tried to con her because of her gender and the absence of a man or when she had to fend of unwanted advances of married men. She decided to slog on with anyway, in the hope that it would get better.

Marriage would give her safety but “wives moved cities and countries every time their husband’s jobs changed, tolerated often-obnoxious in laws, sacrificed careers and passions for the sake of families and devoted all their energy to responding to others.”

The next part of the book is devoted the dating scene for the older single woman and the various bad dates she goes on.Being thrust into the world of millennial dating, she notes of the single women she met, “Being forced to shift from the cozy world of wife to the floundering unicerse of singles was traumatic. They hadn’t stopped mourning their pasts, and talked as if their lives had been real and meaningful only when they married.” But she too is not immune to some of their fallacies: ” “The subconscious lure of marriage as the ultimate life-changer remained powerful.”

Chronicling the barren dating landscape is an essential element of chick lit, but the litany of bad dates here bored me somewhat. I found myself more drawn to the odd good ones. She does make some astute observations about the men she meets, even if the criticisms are possibly too ubiquitous. For example:

Other interactions with middle-aged desi guys have convinced me that whatever little interest they had in other people has slowly dissipated over the years.

and

Their attachment to their parents isn’t always altruistic, though; there are properties and business to be inherited, and desi boys will go to great length to ensure that they don’t lose out on anything.

and

Now every woman knows about Indian men and alcohol. A few drinks down and they start behaving as if the world is their playpen.

There are darker observations too, of being sexually harassed in the office, of being accused of leading men on when all she wanted was friendship, of the sexism in the Indian newsroom. A particularly insightful chapter was the one in which she points to the similarity between the women with AIDS that she meets through work and her own status as a single woman: “They were misfits in their own lives, just the way I was”.

While Bhatia’s journey as a single woman is an exercise in freeing her mind from the mould of good Indian woman, she retains a – dare-I-say-it – prudishness that I found puzzling. She appeared to draw the line at gratuitous sex, which is fine, but there seemed to be a latent judgment about women who pursue this path.

For example, she says of the friends that go to bars to improve their dating chances: “The idea of being perched precariously on a bar stool, trying to chat up men was terrifying and reeked of desperation.” She scoffs at the playboy who woos her with wine and chocolate as a ploy to get into bed, even though her problem with most men is their lack of finesse. She wonders, when faced with  a younger man who seemed to expect her to sleep with him, “what kind of women considered Kingfisher Strong and pizza adequate incentive to get in bed with Vijay?”

In her mind, it appears, sex is a favour to be granted; she didn’t seem to think that women might want it for it’s own sake and be as casual about it as men. She apparently has not met a single woman for whom this is so; instead, she points to women who appear to be casual about sex and who are not.

In the end, the book offers single women the encouragement that there is light at the end of the tunnel of bad dates and scrambling to make logistics work. It may just not be the light you expect.

 

 

 

Man of Her Match

Title: Man of her Match
Author: Sakshama Puri Dhariwal
Publication: June 2017, Penguin India

Man of her Match is a prequel of sorts to The Wedding Photographer, which I wrote about here. It tells the love story of Nidhi and Vikram, who make an appearance in that novel as side characters. Nidhi is the BFF of Risha, the titular wedding photographer, while Vikram, then vice-captain of the cricket team, is a good friend of the groom. We are told that Vikram has just been reinstated into the Indian cricket team and that he is crazy about Nidhi.

Man of her Match  opens with a flashback – eight-year-old Nidhi is desperate to make friends with Vikram, the new boy next door, who spurns her advances, until he doesn’t. Nidhi and Virkam are inseparable – united in a shared love of sports – until they aren’t.

Twelve years later, they meet again. Nidhi is no longer a tomboy and Vikram is the bad boy of the Indian cricket team. Vikram signs up as brand manager of a social campaign that Nidhi is managing. Sparks fly.

This book seemed to me a bit of a mash-up of two Anuja Chauhan novels – The Zoya Factor, which has the Indian cricket captain as the hero, and Battle for Bittora, which pits childhood sweethearts against each other. Where The Zoya Factor had Eppa, the domestic help, and Battle for Bittora had a cast of political “types”, Man of her Match has “the Trio” of cook, driver and security guard who were lonely Nidhi’s childhood playmates and who continued to be part of her household as an adult. Monty, Vikram’s agent, distinguished by his three-button-open shirts, gold jewellery and spotty English is reminiscent of The Zoya Factor’s  Lokinder Singh.

Despite this, it succeeds on its own because Dhariwal excels at the essential ingredient of romance – chemistry between her lead pair.

One begins anticipating Nidhi and Vikram coming face-to-face from the start and the actual meeting does not disappoint even if it is rendered in somewhat over-the-top terms:

The moment Vikram sauntered into the conference room, Nidhi stopped breathing.,even though he was clad in khaki pants and a casual white t-shirt, unwittingly, Nidhi’s gaze clung to him. Her heart hammered relentlessly in her chest , her head started spinning and her knees threatened to buckle under her.

Meanwhile:

As soon as Vikram’s gaze locked on Nidhi, his entire frame went rigid. A cold sheet replaced his amiable smile and his eyes filled with cynical distaste as they raked over her

Like the typical Mills and Boon hero, Vikram is stunningly goodlooking, known for his “crooked smile”. Nidhi observes:

On television, his intentionally groomed stubble and perfectly styled hair has always seemed too metrosexual for nodhi’s taste. But in real life, it made him elegantly masculine and devastatingly handsome. And there was that incredible, chiselled physique. Even in his casual white t-shirt, Nidhi had been able to trace the hard contours of his body

Meanwhile, Vikram is not unmoved by Nidhi’s charms and her transformation. If the makeover is a trope of chick lit, Nidhi’s has already happened to great effect:

“A grey pencil skirt had replaced the baggy shorts she had always worn as a kid, a pair of gleaming black stilettos had substituted her worn out sneakers, and her trademark messy bob had grown into chestnut-brown waves”

Vikram found himself unable to “take his eyes off her damned legs”. Unchanged, however, were ““her deep, dark piercing green eyes” which he says, had always seemed to be able to peer into his soul.

This point is laid on rather thick:

“He had always seen her hands calloused from a match or swollen from a fight. He had never seen them like this – smooth, feminine, gentle.”

He wonders, “What has happened to the combative little spitfire he had played sports with as a kid?”

Vikram has transformed too from “a messy, smelly fighter-cock” who “smelt like a cricket field” to a suave, well-groomed cricketer. In a drunken moment, Nidhi confesses to Vikram that she liked “the you of you” better before, and he assures her that he’s still the same person.

The classic makeover trope requires that he discover the same of her. At the start of their fledgling romance as children, he had told her that he liked her “just the way you are”, a proclamation that seems to be a key discursive feature of romance in chick lit. At the end of the novel, he realises:

“She May no longer be a tomboy, but we had lost neither her athleticism nor her competitive streak. She was agile and aggressive, and even though Vikram was much taller than her and played a sport for a living, she didn’t seem intimidated by him in the least.”

Women who are not intimidated by the hero’s wealth, social status or fame is another classic generic trait, one that was repeatedly emphasised in The Wedding Photographer. Despite this, the man retains the upper hand, remains cool and collected in their exchanges, no matter how passionate he might be in private. For example:

“I’ve been chasing you since morning”

Vikram locked his hands behind his head, looking more carefree than ever. “Congratulations, the chase is over”

 

An interesting narrative element in the novel is the relationship between Nidhi and her father. Like Zoya, in The Zoya Factor, the protagonist’s mother is absent. In Zoya’s case, her mother died. In Nidhi’s, her mother left the family. Unlike Zoya’s affectionate and liberal father, who may have been steamrolled into making halfhearted attempts in arranging a marriage for his daughter but who also refuses to let her sign an agreement that requires her to maintain sexual purity, Nidhi’s father is a gruffer presence who insists his 26-year-old daughter adheres to an 11 pm curfew. Nidhi’s desire to please him is at odds with her other sassy and in control personna, painful for her friends to witness, and to her credit, they call her on it.

[Major spoiler ahead]

Moreover, he was instrumental in driving Nidhi and Vikram apart as children, his pettiness almost implausible. That Nidhi and Vikram fell for it, we must attribute to their age.

There is a somewhat Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge type showdown towards the end of the novel, in which Vikram stands up to Nidhi’s father. What is more unexpected and nicer is that Nidhi stands up to him too – she may agree with him that Vikram is unsuitable, but it is her decision, not his. Nor, as we often see in chick lit, was his choice suitable; to the contrary, the man he sets up with is again a caricature of the bad arranged marriage date.

A final interesting element about the novel was the allusion to the Mumbai-Delhi rivalry, something that was mentioned in The Wedding Photographer. Vikram, we are told, can’t stand Delhi, and much prefers Mumbai as home: “people are supremely lazy, everything closed at midnight”. Nidhi’s theory, however, is that Delhi was associated with two much – associated with her – and he had to resolve that to be comfortable in the city. There is a cute little exchange with Vikram’s friend Natasha where she teases him about it, but beyond that, this contest of cities is not developed, and I think it would have been a nice touch if it had been.

Overall, Puri Dhariwal’s work is more in Mills and Boon territory, than chick lit, and she does this very well. I would have liked tighter editing in this novel and a little less tell and more show, but I also want a novel on Tanvi, the pint-sized cynic