Those Pricey Thakur Girls by Anuja ChauhanMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
The sponge of my emotional mind is still soaked in the tipplings and blottos of its chocolate-box-style scenes and my belly is still pulsating in the babalaas of sentimental maudlins encased & perfectly tucked in this novel through the wrappings of word embellishments.
I was recommended this book via a reading list provided to us in the creative writing class I was attending at SACAC, Hauz Khas. And I have read it twice till now. But the review is of the second time I have read it.
Part rom-com, part suspense-thriller and all in all, a sweetly honey-dipped love story, “Those Pricey Thakur Girls” is written by Ms. Anuja Chauhan, who is the author who has also penned some of the record-breaking taglines for colas, chips & chocolates.
As the Wikipedia also describes, she is the brain behind Pepsi’s “Oye Bubbly, Bubbly Oye” & “Yeh Dil Maange More” jingles, Kurkure’s “Tedha Hai Par Mera Hai” tagline, Lays’ “Be a Little Dillogical” campaign, Kitkat’s “Kitkat Break Banta Hai”, Mountain Dew’s “Darr Ke Aage Jeet Hai” and more! She is also widely known in the Indian advertising, television and even film industry. Her novel “The Zoya Factor” has been formed into a Bollywood movie. And as I came to know only later on after reading this book, that there is even a TV serial based on this novel. It is titled as ‘Dilli Waali Thakur Gurls’ and it airs on &TV.
Anyhow. Let’s get straight into the novel…
Settled across a posh cream-and-maroon bungalow located in Delhi’s Connaught Place area, the novel’s main storyline features a family comprising of a retired justice man named Laxmi Narayan Thakur, his wife Mamta and their five alphabetically-named daughters.
When it comes to the plot setting and descriptions, the book is a total treat for a desi-Indian reader; a treat ranging from the metaphorical street-style cotton candy to a fine Wenger’s pastry.
Especially if you’re a Delhi-ite, you’d catch while reading that the book presents a potpourri of peppery detailings of the typical Delhi lifestyle. From daily morning trips to the local general store to buy milk, eggs & bread, to eating chaat in the Bengali market, chatting over soup & chowpsey in CP’s Berco’s, pondering about important matters over a cup of coffee in United Coffee House and snacking over pastries at Wenger’s; from street dogs and their little potty-balls scattered all around on the streets, to the enthusiastic rush of the high-school farewell parties; from DU’s students boasting everywhere of their college, to even the common slang-ish words & phrases that people appear to use here on the rambling streets and jammed traffic trails; the book offers a loaded palatte of delicious Delhi-flavours crafted in a medley of Hinglish overtones.
In addition to the exquisite Delhi-belly flavours, the book comprises of several tangy ingredients exclusive to a typical Indian household - A girl reaching the age of marriage & getting consistently flooded by questions-and-suggestions from relatives all over the place telling her parents to get her married & inquiring about her career, her age, her makeup skills, her communication skills, her preferences for the boy & crazy things like that - The various emotional & psychological stages that the girls pass through alone as a consequence of this culture - Parents concerned about their teenage daughter staying hooked on phone all day and turning their fears into suspicions that she might have a secret boyfriend at school - The evil superstitions that form in the minds of the married ladies towards their husbands and their children and their in-laws and about their maids and about everybody – The overmature attitude, tantrums & mischiefs of narcissistic kids causing their elders to frown at them - The usual gossips of aunts & uncles that happen during parties, family functions, & ballrooms.
However above and beyond all of these spicy flavours that the novel makes us taste, the sweetest of them is the love story unfolding between the fourth daughter of this family, Debjani, and a man named Dylan, who is a writer.
This is the era of 1980s in Delhi. A period when people in houses wake up to the mellowish retro-style tunes of DD’s News & Chitrahaar flashing in their antenna-studded old-fashioned television sets. Debjani a.k.a. Dabbu has just joined DD’s Mandi House office as a newsreader. While her character is depicted to be a shy, sensitive, caring & all-by-herself person, her younger sister & the fifth in the family, Eshwari, who is also a high-school student at the Modern School located in Barakhamba road, is depicted to be more of a masculine, aggressive & chuckly kind.
Debjani meets Dylan on the account that her father is a close friend of Dylan’s Brigadier father. The character of Dylan falls in the kind of a playboy, a ladies’ man and a Bollywood-style sentimental-plus-witty hero category. The two of them together with their respective fathers, meet every day to play the game of kot-piece, sip tea and relish the bowls of Maggi noodles topped with fried onions and peas.
Then those Indian-style sharmeela ladka-ladki moments happen; their eyelids playing hide-and-seek; looking in the eyes of each other and then looking away. To the boy looking at the girl, she is a total embodiment of goddess with her creamy skin, Pears soap eyes, winged collarbones, ladybird-shaped silver ring and what not about her.
While initiating with this perfectly snapshotted filmy romance scenario, the love story later has to go through a jumble of conflicts, misunderstandings and a total break-up, until, ultimately reaching the congruence of the two lovers finally getting ready to marry each other, which, when you’d complete the book will certainly cause some raindrops to roll down from your eyes till your cheeks.
Withal, their temporary period of separation causes the novel to shift gears into the mode of a suspense and thriller. While Debjani is gaining fame for her newsreading countrywide, Dylan is set-up for becoming the target of a dirty conspiracy plotted by one of his colleagues and a fraud minister Motla who’s involved in a mass assassination riot.
D for Dylan ends up in jail with no evidence to prove his side of things. But as they say, love is love. And so, D for Dabbu risks her countrywide fame and even her job to do something which not only saves Dylan but brings this long-held conspiracy to its closure.
These bits of politics, thrill & conspiracy make the novel only more immersive than it already is. And, as you move forward cover-to-cover into the novel, it grips you in, stronger and stronger so as you won’t be able to put this 388-page-volume down till the end.
Spotlighting a bumblebee-hued cover design with legs cladded in beady flipflops and a cat by the side, the novel represents an interesting tangle of relationships, a sneak peak into the misuse of political & authoritarian powers, crime-bribery-thrill & of course, happy endings…
In the end, as patties, pastries & campa cola is being served in the housewarming party of Dabbu’s Chacha-Chachi’s renovated house next door from their house, Dylan hastily leaves a dosa-idli brunch with his newspaper’s director and drives off in his Maruti 800 to reach there just on time to save Dabbu’s Chachiji falling from the sixth floor. Thereupon, proposing Debjani to marry him, which, is an obvious guess, that, the girl can’t say no to!
My review for Those Pricey Thakur Girls wraps up like this - T for Toe-Curlingly Flirtatious, P for Palpably Delicious, T for Tadka-romance & G for Goosebumpily Gigglesome.
So, do get this book, my friend and relish an entertaining chic-lit read!
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