A Young Woman in Search of a Husband

A self-confessed funny girl, Itisha Peerbhoy’s debut novel, Half Love Half Arranged is definitely funny, laced with familiar characters and an easy urban vibe that is immediately recognisable. It is the tale of 30-year-old Rhea Kanwar — a single Punjabi IT professional who lives with her parents — and is as plagued by her unchanging single status as she is by the impending threat of her ‘boobs racing towards her toes’. About ten kilos over the ideal weight for the prospective bride, Rhea is on a husband hunting mission spurred on by her mother who is our very own homegrown Mrs Bennet, obsessing about the perfect match while running her household and the lives of her three daughters with an iron fist.

If one uprooted Bridget Jones from a very cerebral London sort of a life to a Punjabi household and replaced the dishy suitors with prospective husbands 1 to 3, one would arrive at an approximation of Rhea Kanwar. Except here, the obsession seems to be with finding a husband rather than Mr Right and so much so that towards the end, the book spirals into a crazy race towards the mandap with pretty much anyone who will agree to be there. While this is the disappointing and regressive plot point in an otherwise light and sparkling work of "chicklit", Itisha’s story still retains its fizz and underlying humour. A quick, frothy and light read, Half Love Half Arranged could have done with some brevity as the twists tend to wear thin by the last 50 odd pages of the book and a part of you wants to shake Rhea’s ample frame and ask her to wake up to the 21st century with its suffragettes and the bra burners rather than regress into an imitation of a 19th century Victorian heroine, despondent without a man in her life.

For someone who is independent, strong-willed and otherwise pretty smart and spunky, Rhea ends up in a pile of Pimms-fuelled simpering silliness ever too often. Rhea’s adventures with Pammi Auntiji’s esoteric marriage bureau, her all-girl Vodka fuelled bitching sessions, her camaraderie with her sisters and some spicy dollops of love, sex and dhoka, make this an engaging and light-hearted read without devolving into the stuff of diabetes inducing pulp that seems to have become the mainstay of commercial romantic fiction in India.

The first generation torchbearers of chicklit included the path-blazing wit of Anuja Chauhan, the quirkiness of Advaita Kala and the effervescence of Swati Kaushal. Thereafter, there seems to have been an imaginative void and Itisha Peerbhoy brings some hope to this tired genre, infusing it with a new spark and creating winsome characters for today. While these are women who are unabashed about the choices the make and make no bones about the merit of a good roll in the hay and boast a wicked sense of humour to boot. Peerbhoy’s singular flaw is perhaps her hurry to acquiesce to the fact that a single woman in possession of a brain and a will must be in want of a husband.


This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 3rd March 2015