Chick Lit just upgraded, courtesy a delicious new book
The title is a lovely play on words. Emphasise the second word and it implies a destination. Stress the first, it's a chalta hai-ish description of the anxious fumbling with which most of us approach life. We've not yet arrived, we're not quite there yet, but hey, we're working on it. Its flip side is 'getting away' - leaving behind the humdrum and escaping, on holiday, or just to a different location, where we're not hemmed in by people's expectations of who we are.
The young Manjula finds herself trapped on all sides: by tetchy roommates, eccentric landlords, overbearing family, a low-maintenance boyfriend, and most of all, perhaps, trapped in her own (too excessive) flesh. Getting away from this lot, and getting more (and less) than what she bargained for in the process, is the long and the short of this delightful book.
The term 'Chick Lit' was coined to refer to books that are light, ironic, slightly neurotic and about the perils of being a twenty or thirtysomething girl, the mother of them being Bridget Jones' Diary. One prime qualification for entry into the chick lit canon is an obsession with dieting - and on this, as well as the ironic, neurotic and gendered aspects, Manjula comes up trumps. Her description of the weight-loss clinic run by Dr Prasad and his terrifying psychologist wife, is priceless. Alongside the quest for a new body is a quest for a new soul - catalysed by the arrival of two huge, friendly Dutch men, Piet and Japp, who fetch up in India on a spiritual quest. Like super-charged atoms which suddenly knock an electron out of orbit, their presence changes everything; they elongate and kink the full-stop of Manjula's identity into an excited question mark. Is it Love? Is it Lust? Is it Longing? Or had she just fallen for Piet's delightful Dutch vowels ("Fonthasthique!")?
The journey outwards is also a journey inwards, punctuated with moments of road-to-Damascus-like revelations as she criss-crosses continents: "I had been bottling an extreme emotion within me, without the slightest idea of its potency, like someone who has made preserves out of radioactive plums and is astounded to see them months later, glowing malevolently in the dark of the pantry shelves."
There's something extremely endearing about this combination of huge talent, low self-esteem and a kind of wide-eyed wonder at the sheer weirdness of one's self. The sweet preserves which come out of most chick-lit labelled jars is bland compared with Padmanabhan's pantryful of radioactive plums - I know which I'd prefer, any day. Manjula's wicked caricatures, her fine eye for detail and the lightness of touch that characterises her best drawings are here set in prose: it's yummy, probably bad for you, and an utter delight. Dig in.