There are those uncomfortable instances when you find your mind splayed open like a city gutter, your insides turned up for BWSSB inspection. 

Ananya had been in one such situation, due to certain supernatural events – involving inner demons, brewing cauldrons, and non-consensual drugging. These were events that require the first half of a novel to completely describe. For now, it was enough to say that Ananya wished the whole thing quickly forgotten.

Instead, Ananya found herself unceremoniously dis-invited from her mother-in-law’s kitty parties.

Now the kitty group was certainly not Ananya’s first or even last choice as a social gathering. Four mothers-in-law and their ever-growing brood. To Ananya, this was just small-town conservatism dressed up with freshly-baked cookies. Still, they were warm cookies, and the aunties sharp-tongued, occasionally kind, intrusive, and surprisingly interesting when drugged for experimental reasons.

Both Ananya and her mother-in-law Devi came from small-town Giridham, and regardless of their backgrounds or deficiency in the English language, every effort had been made to make them feel welcome, and much praise lauded over Devi’s jalebis, Kachoris, and samosa. “We are not an elitists,” Junaid would insist to no one in particular, to which Savitha reply, “Then stop calling it Raspberry Gateaux and stick to plum cake!” and Sarah, the warmest of the four, would add, “Oh Savitha, Don’t pull her leg. You like her gateaux…and she really puts raspberries in it…she brought you some from Sweden also. And anyway this Gateaux Wateaux and all is only for rhyming.”

And Ananya would think that this was the only instance that the Junaid could be pressed to rhyme. When food or a well-hung European was involved. Ananya had spent a good part of her four years of married life judging them silently.  She had despised the get-togethers, had attended merely because her own mother-in-law forced her into it, and to be honest it had been something.  Some place to cocoon up and not talk about anything while some daughter-in-law ran after a child, or discussed husbands that refused to pick up after themselves.

Who cared, thought Ananya. Her hope had always lain in the book club.

Unlike the kitty group, the reading club was seriously interesting. These were the kind of people who said “Kafkaesque” or lines like, “that reminds me of something Thomas Hardy said,” in that elegant sort of way that you most immediately knew that that was not somebody’s uncle. 

There was only one catch. The book club found her supremely uninteresting. And why wouldn’t they? Here were humans that could capture the poetry of the library sections they consumed in a matter of few well-turned sentences. They were walking talking books themselves. They were gods on earth!

But the irony of the situation was not missed by Ananya. Bitterly, she went back to those days when her mother forbade school excursions, when she stared through her window and imagined trekking those verdant mountains. How she sat upon the diwan and dreamt up magnificently interesting men and women, all exotically dressed, with the strangest of habits and views, and oh, all so very wellread. 

Such fantasies sometimes have an unnerving way of coming alive and disappointing you. For in no fantasy had these imagined men and women so blatantly ignored her in their discussions. And now, Ananya burnt with that shameful inability to string a few English sentences, to summarize a book she’d spent most of the week reading.  All merely to have a meaningful friend or two.

In a desperate effort to ingratiate herself in any way possible, Ananya tried to make coffee. The reading club seemed to take their coffee as serious as their fiction, and hated anything else as they did self-help books and titles that had fractions in it.   So when she tottered up hopefully with her steel flask and poured out the instant Bru into paper cups, the results were not desirable.

Someone retched. One woman – possibly named Alka or Elsa, Ananya wasn’t sure — said  “What the fuck? There are lumps in this!” and then marched off to her chair with a grunt. Only the lanky quiet man caught Ananya’s embarrassment, and silently moved the flask behind a potted plant.

If she’d had any chance of being invited to the post-book club parties where the real fun happened, that flask had ended it.

Still, she didn’t give up hope. By the next book club meeting, she not only read the book, but wrote a precis about it as she did in school, then mugged it up and repeated the whole thing before the mirror as the self-help book instructed her to. The only step she skipped was the one about imagining everyone naked.

But then her husband Parth, announced, “Book club aa? I’m also coming. We need to do more things together anyway.”

It was not a threat. But it felt like one.

Ananya tried her best to dissuade him, “See,” she addressed him delicately, “You have to read these books to attend these events.” To which he began to laugh raucously, and said that “Ree….nobody reads all this Fiction Viction. Time-waste, only. They just read summaries from Wikipedia and come and show off to get girls’ attention. Tell me tell me. What book are you reading?”

Before she could deflect, he yanked the paperback out of the tote bag that Junaid had once gifted her. Then declared, “This one aa!”

It was Anna Karenina. Her husband quickly flipped through his mobile phone. Ananya had taken the better part of two months to finish this book. But fifteen minutes later,  he declared, “ I am full ready for this book club thing Anni!”

Ananya didn’t know what to say. Her husband looked like he had just solved the problem of feminism. Here was the man who had once asked her if Rumi was “that guy from Coke Studio, no?” Who thought Kurt Vonnegut was a German watch brand. Who commented that Dalloway was a brand of English biscuit.

Here was a man who hadn’t read a piece of fiction since tenth standard, but was certainly going to declare to the book club that he had “gotten the gist of” Anna Karenina.

It was then that she realized that it was over for her.

She wasn’t just going to be excluded from post-reading club parties.

She was going to become the ‘story’.

**

Disclaimer: Not in the least inspired by my book club, which is a marvellously sweet bunch of people.