No more Barbification for her

Reading Ira Trivedi's debut novel is like eavesdropping at the window of the girls' common room. It is bitchy, gossipy, at times bitter, and mostly uncharitable. Not even the most generous review would be able to say much on its plot""that's wafer thin and largely predictable.

For those who missed the catfight on the front pages of city supplements in the metros soon after the book hit the stands in India, here is the wafer.

Labelled as "fiction", this book is the first person account of a girl who is equally familiar with life in a small town of the Hindi heartland, where diesel generators form a vital cog in the wheel, and with life at uppity colleges on the United States' East Coast, where students walk to class through snow.

The protagonist, Riya, having identified the Miss Indian Beauty contest as the shortcut to realising her ambitions, decides to take part.

The boyfriend and parents, in spite of their initial shock, do not turn out to be impediments, and she becomes part of a month-long exercise to choose the winner.

There are not too many surprises in the story. When Trivedi does manage to pack in one, it is mild, such as the result of the pageant. Yet, one has to concede that the book works. It is not a great addition to the bank of English literature""on that parameter, it will rank much below even any of John Grisham's books. But it works because it manages to stoke, and then feed on, the innate curiosity about the world of secrecy it showcases. And that curiosity, in this era of city supplements that find easy fodder in the world of fashion and beauty, is becoming increasingly rampant.

Little wonder then that the publisher claims to have already sold 7,000 copies in a market in which 5,000 copies are the threshold for a book to be declared a hit.

Equally importantly, Trivedi's is a candid account and does present certain well-nuanced scenes, such as the making of the first photo portfolio in a garish small town studio, the diet regimen of contestants, the invasion of the television camera, etcetera. The way the protagonist analyses everyone is particularly interesting, though repetitive enough to create slight fatigue.

More crucially, this is clearly an insider's account. Trivedi has lived in nine different cities, across four countries and three continents. She has studied Economics and International Relations at Wellesley College, and been a student of French in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France. She took part in the Femina Miss India contest in 2004 and lost.

The novel's protagonist Riya is much like her creator""an idealistic Wellesley student who is aspiring to become an investment banker but allows herself the indulgence of a beauty contest.

The grapevine has it that this book was first meant to be autobiographical, and was converted into a fictionalised account at the last minute. This may be because the book has a large number of characters who bear more than passing resemblance to people we know, or think we know. These include Meeta Sengupta (clearly inspired by Sushmita Sen), Alisha Ray (Aishwarya Rai), Mamta Sindhu (Madhu Sapre), Donald Singh (Mickey Mehta) and Promod Kakre (Prahlad Kakkar).

In fact, one cannot shake off the feeling that the effort to fictionalise the story was either insincere, half-hearted or deliberately flimsy. It creates a fictional protagonist, but conveniently settles for something of an anagram of Ira""Riya""for her name.

For some unexplained reason, Ira becomes increasing surly and bitter as the narrative progresses, to the extent that she begins to portray beauty contests as something altogether too infra-dig for her. She even goes to the extent of suggesting that the whole contest could be fixed, decided by extraneous factors.

The one kinship she strikes, other than that with her roommate, is with a contest judge who is remarkably like Anand Mahindra of Mahindra & Mahindra.

Unfortunately for the reader, Trivedi seeks to intellectualise the narrative""such as in her attempt to analyse the business of beauty""but does not quite pull it off.

The other, bigger, disappointment is that while she does take a swipe at the Miss Indian Beauty contest (now, what does that remind you of?), she never really gets her claws out. Perhaps the economics student in the writer was aware of libel laws.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO SAVE THE WORLD?
CONFESSIONS OF A COULD-HAVE-BEEN BEAUTY QUEEN

Ira Trivedi
Penguin
Price: Rs 195; Pages: 233