Shades of the city in pretty young lives

Author Image: 

opinion_columnist [1]

Karishma Attari

[2]

[3]

Rs 250

There are cities within cities and we live out the span of our lives within those cities. It takes national celebrations or local catastrophes to jar us into noticing people that live outside our cocoon; a World Cup win or candlelight vigil are occasions to acknowledge our neighbours.

Cold Feet shows the symptoms of this urban drift in its opening chapter that features five loosely related young women at a bachelorette party in Bombay, each in a different shade of social temper. “Amisha had been in Bombay for about two years now. For her, it was a city that inspired terrifically close friendships in a we’re-all-in-this-together sort of way and it came with the caveat that once you were done with the city, you were kind of done with the friendship, too... it was rare for a Bombay friendship to flourish out of Bombay”.
Bombay is never called Mumbai in this novel and it might well be the Manhattan of the Sex and the City books since it appears to be a passing reference in the social lives of the protagonists. It is hinted at in a wry conversational tone and through generic observations about a single woman’s interactions. Asides from the inconveniences of high rent or the odd traffic jam it does not feature as a real place. This is a culturally vacant, unhistorical, politically neutered environment for the five singletons to sharpen their social skills in. Amisha observes that eight of the 12 invited guests have confirmed attendance to her bachelorette party. “These were good odds for a Friday evening party in Bombay, where everyone’s calendars were fully booked weeks in advance. There was always something happening more important than you.”
Madhavan switches between second- and first-person narratives as she introduces us to the five women that are at the heart of the novel. There is the bachelorette Amisha who develops “cold feet” just before her wedding to an Australian boyfriend. There is baby-doll weather girl Shayna who possesses a self-centred and brittle, yet, nevertheless, attractive vulnerability. Shayna’s path seems destined to lead her to a relationship with an older man and Madhavan lays out the breadcrumbs well on the “daddy issues”.
Shayna is also the object of admiration of the unnamed fifth narrator who struggles with her own loneliness in the city as she comes to terms with her sexual orientation. It is a nice touch that this narrator lives as a paying guest in the house of a has-been movie star with colourful memories of grandeur and lost beauty. That Aunty B and her warm-hearted helper Fauzia are the only ones to help celebrate this narrator’s birthday with an “impromptu party” featuring the hastily-brought out kebabs (meant for the next day’s menu) and Scotch and TV adds a dimension to the way young immigrants are bolstered up and supported in the city. The narrator who is named only in the last chapter is one of the most interesting characters in Cold Feet. She wears her confused heart on her sleeve and her journey towards acceptance and confidence might well have been a worthy story for the novel to stand on.
Cold Feet is a combination of five voices. The remaining two narrators are Ladli and Akshara; they are roommates and mirror images of each other. Both are hung up over men that don’t particularly care for them and
each pities the other for her obsessiveness.
Cold Feet leaves you lukewarm in terms of reading pleasure. Madhavan has her ironies in place, her narrators are engaging and their charming lack of self-awareness is nicely portrayed. Unfortunately, the trick repeats itself; self-deprecation can get old when it’s played out with the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of consecutively featured Pretty-Young-Things. The self-conscious chatter begins to
wear the story down and it is hard at times to tell the voices apart.
Ladli’s forced holiday away from work has a sprinkle of glamour to it. “I had been planning to be very awesome and economical and backpacker-y about the whole thing… My plan was to hop into one of the unreserved compartments, this was the way I was doing this trip, all very spur-of-the-moment! With the wind whipping through my hair… I had a journal, which I planned to fill with my ‘cool, travelling by the seat of my pants insights’”. Compare this to Shayna at a bar. “There are days when I feel kind of… melancholic… Sort of sad, sort of poignant, sort of like I’m in a black-and-white arthouse movie and I’m looking straight ahead, my eyes filled with meaning. This city does that to you.”
With more outside posturing than inner thoughts Cold Feet is a light if not entirely satisfying read. It is not a chiclit novel where romance is the ultimate resolution to all female woes. Nor do its chapters really extend the inner life of these women beyond a kind of superficial makeover as suggested by pithy titles like “Becoming Who You Want to Know”, “Instant Karma”, or “Wisdom is as Wisdom does”.
Madhavan creates some nice moments, not the least being the epilogue when the five narrators’ lives are briefly entwined. For the rest of the book the five narrators roll in and out of each other’s lives, some as friends, and others as the kind of strangers that you collide into when you live in a metro that once went by the name of Bombay.