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ShareMumbai: Faking It
Amrita Chowdhury
Hachette India
338 pages
Rs250
The cover of Amrita Chowdhury's first novel is just the right shade of fluffy pink to suggest chuckle-a-minute chic-lit. But in some ways, the author is indeed faking it. Sure, there are the classic discontents of mom-lit: an indifferent husband, the demands of being a yummy mummy, a looming affair, etc. But in no time at all, Faking It has the reader traipsing through the world of crime with all the relish of a Nancy Drew detective novel.
Provided Nancy Drew took time out for luxury spa dates of course. For Chowdhury's protagonist Tara goes from being a senior economist with a financial firm in Washington DC to becoming a trophy wife in grimy Mumbai. Tara whines with admirable persistence about the move, even before the aircraft has achieved touchdown. In Mumbai, Tara triumphantly enters Indigo deli having negotiated "the unassuming street frontage of broken stones and crumbling masonry ... the occasional starved baby being passed around equally starved women in search of pity-money" to exclaim "(with) a little sigh of relief: I could order a proper latte here, I just knew it!" One is almost tempted to side with the beleaguered husband Raj.
But the novel gathers strength once Tara gets involved with the local art scene. Desperate to join the shiny happy people that glow in the light of press flash bulbs, Tara invests all her savings in acquiring an Amrita Sher-Gil painting. By the time she learns it's a fake, it is too late to go public, for she risks losing reputation as a newly-minted art curator. She begins to investigate theworld of high-end art crime to find that the perpetuators will stop at nothing to shut her up. In marrying chic-lit with crime thriller, Chowdhury trades comic wryness for the compulsions of a hurtling plotline. But she also opens up a new genre: NRI chic-lit-crime thrillers? You saw it here first.
