Girls and the City: Dishing out unpalatable truth

Ambika Shaligram

Food and all the closest adjectives that make up the culinary world grab you in Manreet Sodhi Someshwar's Girls and the City. It tosses you around, lets you simmer a bit, and sets you out on a plate to chew and ruminate. 

There's Reshma Talwar, who loves her Butter Chicken, but in her heart she's afraid of being called the gori moti bhains, a scar from her teenage years. JJ or Juhi Jha, on the other hand, easily tucks into large quantities of food, stays back late in office because the company picks up food tab if you stay back beyond the prescribed hours for work reasons. She knows hunger and intimately so, scrounging off pots for the last grain of rice or trying to hide a roti in her salwar, away from the males in the family who dig in their meals for second and third helping. 

And, then there is Leela Lakshmi, who has lot on her plate. An abusive father, an abusive relationship, from which she has tenaciously build a happy life for her daughter, Nani or Nayanika and herself. They are well-fed, but Leela never knows when she has to fall back on her Plan Z, if she is unable to retain her freelance assignment with Royal Foods via DreamCom. She is handling the communications brief for DreamCom whose biggest and oldest client is Royal Foods. All the three protagonists live and work in Bengaluru.

The three are work colleagues, with Reshma being the marketing lead for McMaster's Consultants, which is advising Royal Foods on where they are going wrong. Juhi is the trainee at DreamCom and is working closely with Leela. Kieren Warrior, a desi from America and Reshma's boss, who has gone vegetarian in India, completes the table. 

However, food is only one of the ingredient that goes into making of Girls and the City. The title definitely has a recall value (we are not saying which one) and may pass off as a generic at first. It's only later when the background stories of the characters interfere with their present, that you realise that all the little, big secrets that the girls are harbouring, could be your or mine stories. We all have come from different towns and tier-two cities to a metro city, to prove a mark, to climb a social or corporate ladder, to escape guilt...to find peace.

What if the girls from Unnao had lived? Would they have become Juhi, who is mocked as gori ganwar in her office? In the book, Juhi hails from Unnao. Reshma's father has been murdered and Leela is braving all stigmas that a single woman/parent faces. Their stories stem from the headlines of our newspapers...of gangrape, abuse, bullying, sexually molested, preyed upon in office. That's what makes Reshma, Juhi and Leela are real. And, their experiences in Bengaluru, in fact it could be any city, become unpalatable for the readers at times. 

Title: Girls and the City

Author: Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 351

Price: Rs 399

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