The Vague Womans's Handbook

By Devapriya Roy

They are bad with directions; they never know when the credit card bill is due. They have perfected the art of turning over a new leaf tomorrow. Meet the vague women in this delightful first novel that doesn't star a woman looking for the right man - because she's already found him! At twenty-two, Sharmila Chatterjee has just married her sweetheart of a few years, Abhimanyu Mishra, a somewhat eccentric if handsome twenty-three-and-a-half year old with obscure academic interests and a small fellowship that never arrives on time. They start a household in a tiny rented flat, learning to fend for themselves in the big, bad and snotty world of south Delhi, with penny-pinching landlords, some romance, and a lot of anxiety. At fifty-two, Indira Sen is not sure just how she meandered to where she finds herself now. A senior government officer and single mother, she lives with her daughter and three opinionated old people in a rambling house, drives a battered car, and has a history of credit-card induced shopaholism. The Vague Woman's Handbook is a story told with equal parts of humour, hysteria and tenderness, about the sparkling friendship between two women as they hurtle through life and its mini-crises while trading secrets in the art of survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9789350292686

Devapriya Roy

Devapriya Roy has degrees in English literature and performance studies from Presidency College, Kolkata, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and adds a languishing Ph.D to her list of mustfinishes. She had her thirty seconds of fame on the idiot box as the Keo Karpin girl. She has worked as an editor with Sahitya Akademi and Routledge Books. She is currently working on a travelogue, The Heat and Dust Project, with her husband Saurav Jha.

Book preview

Book I

somewhere near connaught place, new delhi

1.1

It was late February near Connaught Place and already forty past ten when Mil Chatterjee, hair all aflutter in the sun-streaked wind, finally admitted to herself that she was lost.

It was not a good time.

For one, the interview was scheduled for ten. And not only had she not managed to locate the Indian Academy of Literatures, if she knew herself – and her dysfunctional radar – she was probably not even close.

As the truth sank in with grudging finality, the swooshy feeling in the pit of her stomach got worse, panic slopped in her throat, her ears buzzed, she felt faint.

The four roads radiating from the crossing – each one wide, tree-lined and remarkably similar to the next – were growing hazier by the second, blurring into a kind of strange sameness of dark grey concrete flecked with white and a film of fine dust. An eternal ur-road. Where on earth was this Galileo Marg? That quiet, leafy avenue of the website, where the delightful premises of the Academy were located, pink in the afterglow of its Nehruvian vision. Only, Mil had added the pink and the afterglow.

Even amid the shutdown operations, she could hear Abhi’s voice clearly through the fuzz in her head. ‘Keep your nerve, for heaven’s sake!’ Don’t be such a drama queen in brackets, though he would know better by now than to tell her that. ‘Pull yourself together. Use your head. It’s not rocket science, you know.’

Except, it was.

Around ten, she had been unceremoniously offloaded at the crossing of Chandragupta Avenue by the autowallah with the ridiculous goatee who had counted his change meticulously and told her before varrooming off that, as far as he knew, Galileo Marg was close by, somewhere here or there but, sadly, he couldn’t be certain.

Mil had been wandering about hysterically ever since. Nobody, it seemed, had heard of such an Academy.

‘Government office, bhai saab? For Indian literatures? Galileo Marg? Near Manipur House?’ she had desperately asked an office-goer whose tiffin-box left tiny pools of oil on the road through a sheer polythene bag as he marched past her in a hurry. ‘Many government offices in this area, madam,’ he had muttered, shaking his head through the rich aroma of aloo-parathas his wife must have made in the morning. ‘Never heard of this one.’

Mil sniffed the air hungrily in his wake. She hadn’t had time for breakfast.

1.2

Another five minutes trundled by.

Pointless though it was, she looked once more at the scrap of paper clutched in her hand. Half a page from an old notebook, on which she’d hastily scribbled the address – 25 Galileo Marg, opposite Manipur Bhavan – next to an abandoned grocery list. The bored receptionist from the Academy had caught her at an hour when she’d just turned over a new leaf and was making all kinds of lists in a notebook. True, the receptionist had given some directions when she’d called, but Mil had been too busy doing a silent war dance to jot down the details. It was her first job interview ever!

Then again, all this road-related drama was, to be fair, in character. Her propensity to mix up turns, lose her way, then blank out completely and complicate matters further by getting hysterical and panicky was well-known. Not that it didn’t have some pleasant associations – that was how Abhi had fallen in love with her, lost in some street in Calcutta.

She had forced him, then her senior at college, to endlessly orbit College Square with her one wistful evening five years ago, looking vaguely for a shop she thought she had seen during the day. After an hour of wandering, they still hadn’t found it. But he’d spent the entire time looking at her anxious profile, the curious curve of her cheek and, in the end, patted her back uncertainly to comfort her. He had fallen irretrievably in love.

But that was several years ago. He didn’t hold a misty-eyed view of such capers any more.

He routinely told her, with the typical smugness of those who can read maps backwards and have compasses in their heads, that there were no such things as ‘dysfunctional radars’, only ‘the application of one’s faculties’. Or ‘a patent lack thereof’. Period.

A car hooted rudely; Mil brought herself back to earth.

And so it begins.

At that unique hour of quarter to eleven on that staid Monday morning, when many a soul had already been languishing in office for over an hour, Mil Chatterjee, our heroine, once of Calcutta, is glimpsed, windswept and clutching onto a shapeless brown leather bag. Hyperventilating. Shiny uncaring cars whiz past through the haze of winter morning. Her scarf is blue in the distance.

The late February sun gleams all nice and toasty over the tall trees, utterly uncomprehending of minor human crises.

1.3

As it happens, Mil’s day had been blighted from the very beginning.

She had left home in a crazy rush to get printouts of her CV from the neighbourhood cybercafé and realized guiltily at the gate of the colony that she’d left the map Abhi had sketched for her in the kitchen. It was a sticky moment.

Technically, she could still rush back and get it, but the whole operation would take a good seven minutes at least. Since the two of them hadn’t got around to making a duplicate key, there was an outside chance that Abhi might be in the toilet, immersed in his newspaper, in which case he probably wouldn’t even hear her banging on the door and it would be a waste of time. Plus, he would ask questions. He had repeatedly reminded her the previous evening to put his beloved map inside her bag and she’d said she wouldn’t forget and would he please stop obsessing. No, there was really no time for all that. She would manage by herself and without a map, thank you very much.

The three fate sisters dawdling with their charkhas possibly overheard. Within seconds, trouble came her way, skipping blithely, as their landlord stepped into view, striding purposefully in her direction. It was impossible to pretend she hadn’t seen him.

‘Heh, heh, heh…’ His usual faux-laugh preceded his large belly. ‘So where are you these days?’ (Read: ‘Where’s the rent?’) ‘We never get to see you around… Very busy or what? Haan? Haan?’

For heaven’s sake, Mil thought to herself irritably, it’s only the twenty-third! They had overshot by just a few days. Theirs was an unorthodox eighteenth-to-eighteenth rent cycle (chosen by Agarwal for numerological reasons). Abhi’s cheques hadn’t come through yet. Mil made a face. As if, she thought darkly, he wasn’t sitting pretty on the hefty sum they had initially paid him, security and whatnot.

That had hurt – two months’ rent as security deposit and one month’s worth to the property broker (who would get the same amount from the landlord, too). The Agarwals had immediately begun renovating their side of the house, bringing in fuchsia pink marble and designer fittings in a show-offy manner. And naturally, they hadn’t bothered to ask Mil and Abhi if they so much as needed a nail hammered in somewhere. To hang a painting or something.

There was no logic behind the rent either – nine-and-a-half-thousand plus electricity and water for Jagadish Prasad Agarwal’s one-and-a-half-room palace with the plaster peeling in the bathroom – except, of course, that it was south Delhi. Not exactly hyper posh Greater Kailash-south Delhi but, well, acceptably so. It was not too far from the heart of town, and it had a balcony where the sun left twirly shadows through the railing. ‘Snap it up, sir,’ the paan-chewing property broker had winked conspiratorially. ‘Take it today. Give them a token thousand rupees or something. You won’t get it tomorrow! Why, just tonight I might find somebody willing to pay ten thousand for this… It’s only because I really like you and your madam that I’m going for a low rate. Taking a loss myself. He-he.’

Panicstricken Mil, after four days of countless crushing disappointments, had whispered to Abhi, ‘Let’s take it. Please.’ At least from the outside it was a lovely white three-storey house with a red gate and a small courtyard where they might linger for a few minutes while the Agarwals slept or were away.

With that token deposit, JP and Co. had entered their lives.

While Mil cribbed mentally, the landlady, JP’s arthritic wife, hobbled in her direction. She simpered, ‘Arre, Millie… we have totally forgotten that you people live here! Where are you these days? Very busy or whaaat? Haan?’

Conversations between the Agarwals and Abhi/Mil were invariably thus – highly metonymic. One set of things was said out loud; for instance, ‘Oh, so you are the reading type!’ Both parties knew exactly what that meant: ‘No wonder you’ve kept the house so dirty!’ But of course, they all pretended otherwise.

Mil wanted to come up with a crushing retort. Instead, she found herself smiling brightly.

‘Oh, hello, uncle, hello, aunty. What a pleasant day it is! We are fine, thank you very much. How about you? I am afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry. Abhi will come and see you in the evening. Byeee…’

She twirled with the stretched syllable and vanished round the corner in an elegant operation. Phew!

After that close encounter, Mil had turned into the alley behind the colony on her way to the ‘Mini Market’, having duly noted that it was already 9:15. In retrospect, she thought crossly, she had ended up being way too nice to them. Some (like Abhi) might even brand it as ‘fraternizing with the enemy’. Anyway, she reasoned with herself, not all times are ripe for crushing retorts. Sometimes – always, if in Delhi – discretion is the better part of valour.

Mini Market, rich with the associations of an archetypal bazaar, formed the gateway to the largish village which sprawled proudly behind their colony, the latter a pretentious little quarter where property prices, if the extravagant estimates of brokers and landlords were to be believed, nearly rubbed shoulders with those of the Upper East Side. Some of the residents obviously took these claims to heart; they were so conscious of their poshness that they glided over the road as they stepped out of their large sedans, feet several inches above the ground.

But before she got all hot and bothered over the sociological question, Mil reached her destination. Gupta Printex. The neighbourhood Photocopy-Internet Parlour where one could get printouts if the third shop assistant was present. Only he could make the moody printer work. By now it was nine-twenty and she had to get three copies of her CV before reaching the Academy.

Grinning broadly, the second assistant, Raju, informed her that Ram Avatar, the printer expert, had just left. ‘Barely thirty seconds ago,’ he added, as if that would cushion the blow. Mil offered to work the printer herself, but obviously, Raju was a model employee who couldn’t possibly allow some stranger to tamper with his master’s precious device.

Mil had two options – she could wait for Ram Avatar (for god knows how long) or try to locate another shop with a functional printer. It was already nine-twenty-five.

She scanned the neighbourhood, and finally spotted a seedy little cybercafé on the second floor of ‘Hotel Mallika’. Mini Market was choc-a-bloc with pure vegetarian bhojanalayas, halwai shops sticky with mounds of sweets that had flies and fat office-goers hovering around them at all hours, and hotels with rooms which were rented out at hourly rates. Thankfully, the elusive Ram Avatar emerged at that instant from the tiny doorway of Mallika, looking around in a furtive manner, clutching a couple of CDs with lurid covers.

For the time being, Mil’s miseries ended.

By nine-forty she was safely perched in an auto, waiting hopefully for the traffic signal to change to green at the crossing of Aurobindo Marg where the expansion plans of the Delhi metro had laid a number of booby traps for travellers. It was all under control, she reassured herself. In twenty, twenty-five minutes max, she would be at the Academy, explaining to whoever she had to report to, the myriad ways in which the god-awful construction work was disrupting the lives of punctual people.

She even allowed herself to feel somewhat happy as a lazy breeze ruffled her hair while they sped past Safdarjung’s tomb, its red sandstone glow a fine contrast to the surrounding green. She glanced at her CV hopefully – perhaps she would get the job, and then, maybe, they could buy a bed.

Mil gathered her hair and pulled it away from her face. Winter was on the wane in the city. The morning-edginess of commuters coloured the air. She had just about saved the day. Fleetingly, she thought of how her mother and other like-minded (Bengali) uncles and aunts would have insisted on getting printouts of the CV a week before and would have left the house at least an hour-and-a-half before time, with a dahi teeka for luck.

At least one of the charkha-wielding fate sisters must have had some Bengali blood, because an hour later, as Mil Chatterjee, bound for the Indian Academy of Literatures in order to appear for an interview for the post of assistant editor, found herself stranded somewhere near Connaught Place, the travails of the morning seemed nothing.

1.4

Mil looked around blankly for the millionth time. The sun had climbed higher still (she could safely shove the silly scarf into her bag). There wasn’t a soul in sight. Just a toothless gardener trimming a ridiculous WELCOME-shaped hedge outside one of the bungalows, whom she had already asked thrice.

For no reason but what psychoanalysts might call ‘free association’, Mil thought of Naira, the Armenian beauty with whom she had shared a room for one university semester. Didn’t Naira have a quick-fix solution for misadventures?

Mil scrunched up her eyes in concentration. Yes, of course, there it was, her eternal motto: ‘When in doubt, breathe in and out!’ The words came to her in a rush. According to Naira, it was this sadhana that gave her strength from within to deal with whatever catastrophe came her way. Including a boyfriend turning out to be an international druglord with interests in the Chinese mafia, a discovery made while they were in a deserted farmhouse in Uttaranchal. What was this in comparison?

In a hopeful sort of way, Mil closed her eyes, trying to visualize Naira’s yogic demonstrations and copy them.

Breathe in… Hold (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)… Breathe out… Okay, she might be running forty-seven minutes behind schedule, but all was not lost yet. But wait, she shouldn’t be exclaiming through this. Calm down. Breathe in… Of course she could deal up, married woman. Hmmm… dual vibrations here – sloppy smile but also triggers to horrible shouting matches with parents, etc., etc. That couldn’t be good. No, forget that last. Breathe in

Once she calmed herself through this holistic exercise, focusing only on the destination, her mind would clear. Her nerves would relax and everything would fall into place. She would find her way to the damned Academy like a seasoned cartographer and enter the interview – cool, cleansed and beatific. Breathe out…

Having puffed through the routine a couple of times, however, Mil was forced to admit that it wasn’t working all that well. Not at all, actually.

So, in the interest of beginnings, at that practical hour of nearly eleven, good sense prevailed over what is probably, in psychoanalysis, called ego. With a final gasp, Mil Chatterjee, panicstricken and sweaty, flipped open her bag and, like the best of us in exigencies, did exactly what she’d promised herself she’d never do again.

decision on a cloudy day (two months ago)

2.1

It was one of the last Mondays of the previous year, an impatient Christmassy day full of clouds and haze, when Mil Chatterjee made up her mind about getting a job.

The sky had been deliciously poised to rain all day long, a grim grey with fat swirling clouds.It didn’t until late at night but the elemental deception, in a mysterious way, helped her achieve some degree of clarity regarding the complexities of her life.

It was late afternoon.

She had just finished writing (read: faffing through) her final MA exam – ‘Globalization. Changing Trends in Literature’ – and was walking back to the hostel. The student residences were clustered at one end of the campus and required a long trek through pathways littered with yellow leaves that crackled underfoot. Technically, it wasn’t her last paper. She still had a whole semester to go. But since she had been hyperactive and taken six courses each in the first three terms, she could, if she liked, take a zero semester and finish off with her degree, with a couple of courses to spare for good measure. And in the light of her changed circumstances – in other words, her unplanned and, some might say, eminently unreasonable marriage to Abhi, the consequent drama in Calcutta, her refusal to draw money from the parental (i.e., the control op-centre) account and, of course, the decision to move out of the hostel and in with Abhi – Mil had decided that she would indeed like to exercise that option.

She had deliberately sought the advice of the youngest professor of their faculty of literature and culture studies, confiding in him the whole truth. Anandam Chattaraj, a thin, bearded man who smoked incessantly, was a practising poet and postmodernist, well-known as a believer in the plurality of stances and usually vocal against the overarching opinions of authority figures. Like deans and vice-chancellors, for instance. He had said uneasily, ‘Well. Hmm.Well. Ideally, you should not take a zero semester unless you’re terribly ill or something. And, ideally, you should complete your degree properly. I would definitely recommend you reconsider. However, you have completed the requisite number of courses. And your grades are good. So, at the end of the day, it’s your decision.’ He was not entirely convinced about what he said, but there it was.

Mil was almost happy about her decision.

This was, she reflected, the chief advantage of not having one’s parents around. There was nobody to obsess about classes and degrees, faint at the prospect of leaving university before the legitimate time period (even though one would get the degree eventually), agonize over what would become of them if they gave up their studies, and so forth. Basically, there was nobody to call the shots from the wings.

She smiled to herself, half sadly, and walked down the stony tarmac bordered by a thousand neem trees that left a bitter scent in the air.

Along with the sharp smell of winter rain and the sting in the chilly wind, there was a kind of vague hope in the air – the sort you associate with the last day of school before the holidays begin, or a shivery-cold windy day when there’s