Selling Love

In her debut novel, Itisha Peerbhoy writes about a 30-year-old woman on a quest for love in India.

itisha peerbhoy, half love half arranged

Peerbhoy says that her novel is a Jane Austen-esque commentary on marriage in India.

When Itisha Peerbhoy first wrote about the exploits of a 30-year-old woman desperate to get hitched, in 2010, she had already been married for over six years. Yet, she says that she had no difficulty in finding her protagonist’s perspective. “Even though I was married at 25, I have lots of friends who were single or got married in their early 30s. While unmarried men would carry on with their lives, women were mostly unhappy. The tragic-comedy of the situation really struck me,” says Bangalore-based Peerbhoy.

In Half Love Half Arranged (Penguin, Rs 250), the protagonist Rhea Kanwar is 30, from a quintessentially Punjabi family in Delhi, and traipsing through life looking for “the one”, with a little help from Pammi aunty who runs a marriage bureau. She drinks Pimm’s, goes to the club for tambola nights with her family and lives in constant fear of turning into her mom’s best friend, who calls herself a “recycled virgin”. However, all the guys she meets and dreams of living in a paradise with, are perfect until things go wrong — hung up on exes, commitment-phobics or bad in bed. For her family, things take a turn for the worse when her sister comes out of the closet.

Peerbhoy says marriage is always a special experience for single women in urban settings. “I’ve always been interested in characters who fall between the cracks, and people who are in some way fractured. And humour was a way to bring topics like that to the table,” she says.

While the book is a work of fiction, the humour in it, she says, was inspired from her own childhood and annual visits to her maternal family in Delhi. With a sister who was a model, Peerbhoy was subjected to frequent jibes about her weight and how she would get married. “The character of Pammi aunty is definitely inspired by everything I witnessed while growing up,” she says.

While growing up, Peerbhoy led a very sheltered life, and got a glimpse of the real world only when she went to college. “In school, I was an average student, but I found my groove while studying literature in college,” she says. An avid reader of Mills & Boon, she calls her novel a Jane Austen-esque commentary on marriage in India. However, she is quick to clarify that she does not want to be slotted as a romance writer. “I want to be called a humour writer, who talks about controversial subjects, but in a not-so-serious way.”

Peerbhoy knows that her book is one in many of the countless novels on love in the Indian market. “There is a lot of sub-standard writing and it’s hard to convince people that you’re not one of them,” she says.

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